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Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, factually erred recently in saluting what he described as President Donald Trump’s removal of a Muslim federal judge who had practiced Sharia law.

The false account has evidently been amended to say: “Well it looks like I may have been duped. This may be fake news, but I still think Sharia law has no place in the United States of America.”

“It looked interesting,” Smith said, going on to suggest that among some 55,000 Miller posts on the Facebook page over four years, perhaps five turned out to lack a factual basis.

“That’s a pretty good track record,” Smith said. “It’s not our intent to put out misinformation."

Walters, by the way, received a BS in marketing, advertising and PR at university.

A Monmouth University poll finds that 71 percent of Americans, including two-thirds of Republicans, think that President Trump should answer Robert Mueller’s questions.

Well before The Wall Street Journal reported that a porn star with the meteorological name of Stormy Daniels was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about sex with Donald Trump, it was clear that a bigger and more crass proposition would be emerging from the White House.

Going into the midterm elections, Trump is offering this deal to his supporters: Say nothing about the lies, the bullying, the accusations of sexual misconduct from more than a dozen women, the undermining of the rule of law, the abdication of basic decency — and in turn he will make you rich.

Essentially, it’s a payoff. Trump himself has framed it this way. When asked about his coming health exam last month, he said, “It better go well, otherwise the stock market will not be happy.” He used the same phrase when talking about his hard-line position on immigration.

Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton oversaw spectacular gains in the stock market — among the best in history. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 227 percent during Clinton’s eight years and 149 percent under Obama.

Yet, neither of those men held the market out as hostage to a backward agenda and a deranged personality. Trump is running a bottom-line presidency — as soulless as a Kremlin bot on Facebook — in which people who know better are asked to stay quiet in exchange for a short-term payoff.


Modern presidents, dating at least to Ronald Reagan, have urged voters to ask one question going into pivotal elections: Are you better off than you were before? It’s a reasonable standard. But it has never been the leverage for allowing a democracy to collapse.

You heard some uplifting words during the State of the Union address, words with all the staying power of vapor from a sewage vent. But a more honest assessment of what this presidency represents came from Trump when he was in his element, surrounded by Mar-a-Lago cronies. “You all just got a lot richer,” he told a bejeweled and pink-faced crowd just a few hours after signing the $1.5 trillion tax cut in December.

Even as Trump spoke before Congress on Tuesday, he monetized the speech, with donors paying to have their name live-streamed across a Trump campaign web page.

A cartoon in Politico showed a naked Trump with a king’s crown and a golf club walking down a red carpet. “I know, I know,” one man says to another. “Just keep thinking about your stock portfolio.”

The question for those yet to join the enablers is: What’s the price — a record stock market in which 10 percent of Americans own 84 percent of the market wealth, a tax cut that burdens the working poor in years to come — for saying nothing?

Evangelical Christians were among the first to sign on to a Stormy Daniels proposition. In the infamous words of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, Trump gets a “do-over” for the infidelity allegation. Yes, because nothing says family values like a thrice-married man who allegedly cheats on his latest wife just after she gives birth to their son. And Pat Robertson, the mush-headed moralist who still fogs up many a television screen with his gaseous utterances, told Trump last summer, “I’m so proud of everything you’re doing.”

For these self-appointed guardians of the soul, the bargain is bigger than 30 pieces of silver: It’s a promise that Trump will continue to protect their tax-exempt empires, in the name of religious freedom.

For Republicans in Congress, the pact is more consequential. They will ignore the pleadings of career law enforcement officials in order to stoke fantasies of a deep-state coup against the president. These politicians are counting on a base that will look the other way as they undermine Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian tampering with the election.

It’s a good bet. After Trump called the American justice system “a joke” and “a laughingstock,” after he fired the F.B.I. director because he would not pledge loyalty to him, after he told another top lawman that his wife was “a loser,” after he referred to members of the intelligence community as “political hacks,” it was all quiet on the Republican front.

He can falsely say that his State of the Union speech drew the highest audience in history — in fact, it ranked ninth since 1993 — because this president has told more than 2,000 lies in a year and hasn’t been called out for them by the people who signed on to silence.

But what happens if the bargain crumbles? What if the market tanks — as the Dow did in losing more than 500 points a few days ago? Do the sycophants bail? Or do they hold out for something more — like the lobbyists now drafting legislation and gutting regulations that affect the companies that pay them?

Beware, those of you who have made your deal with the Stormy Daniels presidency. You can take your settlement money — as the people who signed up for the fraudulent Trump University did — but you still got suckered.

President Trump on Friday accused the top leadership of the Justice Department and FBI of having “politicized the sacred investigative process,” posting an incendiary tweet hours before the expected release of a controversial congressional memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI.

You heard some uplifting words during the State of the Union address, words with all the staying power of vapor from a sewage vent.

Quote:

You heard some uplifting words during the State of the Union address, words with all the staying power of vapor from a sewage vent.

Oh golly. I really like that.

The great debate consuming Washington right now is this: Will President Donald Trump release the memo or not?

The answer, I think, is simple: Yes, of course he will. Because that's who he is. And what he does.

The memo in question comes from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a California Republican, and allegedly details a series of missteps, mistakes and misinformation at the highest levels of the FBI.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed after firing then-director James Comey last May, and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein have voiced "grave concerns" about releasing the memo, which, they have suggested, omits important facts and provides an incomplete and inaccurate picture of how the bureau conducted itself during the 2016 election.

So passionate is Wray about not releasing the memo that White House officials are worried he may well quit if Trump gives Congress the OK to do so.

And yet, as Trump boarded Marine One to return to Washington from a speech at the Republican congressional retreat in West Virginia on Thursday afternoon, a senior administration official made clear that the President is expected to give Congress the go-ahead as soon as Friday morning.

"The president is OK with it," a senior administration official said. "I doubt there will be any redactions. It's in Congress' hands after that."

If you are surprised by that decision, you have been residing on another planet for the better part of the last three years.

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When you're attacking FBI agents because you're under criminal investigation, you're losing

If you’re a high-ranking law enforcement official in the Trump administration, there’s probably going to come a time when the president of the United States will make it clear to you that your loyalty should be not to the duties of your job, not even to the Constitution, but to him personally.

The president’s need for loyalty and his incessant demands for it are becoming hallmark characteristics of his presidency, in ways that will increasingly define not just his relationship with those who work for him
but also Republicans in Congress and the entire GOP.

We’ll get to all that in a bit, but first the latest news from CNN

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein visited the White House in December seeking President Donald Trump’s help. The top Justice Department official in the Russia investigation wanted Trump’s support in fighting off document demands from House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes.

But the President had other priorities ahead of a key appearance by Rosenstein on the Hill, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Trump wanted to know where the special counsel’s Russia investigation was heading. And he wanted to know whether Rosenstein was “on my team.”

It’s one of the ironies of the Trump presidency that there may have been no president in history who demanded such unswerving loyalty from both his underlings and from those who in government who are theoretically independent of him, and yet there may also have been no president in history who received so little loyalty from those working for him.

CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak