monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The GOP’s defense of Trump has me sinking into cynicism

I suggest the Department of Justice be brought up on charges of Obstruction of Justice.

You welcomed Obama weighing in on Brexit...

Paula White, Trump’s Personal Pastor, Joins the White House

Ms. White, a controversial figure even among evangelical Christians, will be overseeing a White House division that conducts outreach to key parts of the president’s base.

...In the interview, she spoke admiringly of the president’s intellect. “He’s in total control,” she told The Post. “He’s not at all impulsive — he’s so far ahead of everyone, very much a strategic thinker.”

...Trump and his most obedient loyalists have made it clear that they will treat any daylight between Republicans in Congress and the president as betrayal, and any outcome other than Trump’s glorious acquittal and re-election as illegitimate. Trump has called Republicans who have criticized his Ukraine conduct “human scum,” but even before the impeachment he began seeding the argument that his term limits should be extended as reimbursement for the years of his presidency eaten up by scandal.

Those arguments, dismissed at the time as unserious, have now slipped into the mainstream of right wing discourse. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article suggesting the Constitution be amended to allow presidents impeached but acquitted to serve a third full term in office. More ominously, Mollie Hemingway, who writes for a Trump-propaganda outlet called the Federalist, has intimated that Trump supporters would be within their rights to riot in order to stop the impeachment, because it is the impeachment itself, not the impeachable conduct under investigation, that has subverted the election.

Democrats “should stop expecting people to be as polite as they have been,” Hemingway writes ominously, because the impeachment of Donald Trump, “represents a fatal threat to our system of government, and if this coup succeeds — whether through impeachment proceedings, or through an election that (if the last three years are any indication) the other side is clearly willing to steal by hook or by crook — the nation will cease to be a constitutional, democratic republic.”

Edward Snowden says Facebook is just as untrustworthy as the NSA
The NSA surveillance whistleblower issued a scathing review of tech in his upcoming interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher.