Okay, I'm back doing this again: Get all my Trump posting for the day over in one big dump. In fact, I just decided that starting tomorrow, I'm going to call this The Trump Dump. It has a nice ring to it…
- Fred Kaplan points out one reason that things are such a mess in the Trump Administration: He's not appointing all the deputy, under, and assistant secretaries who actually do most of the work.
- Andrew Sullivan is back and sorta-blogging. This one is about how the media should deal with the lies told by Trump and those around him. That sounds a lot easier to demand than it does to enforce, especially when Trump himself won't sit for interviews with anyone interested in doing that. Bill O'Reilly was interested in coming across as tough without actually being tough. And frankly, most people are falling into one of two categories: Those who know Trump lies and those who don't care as long as they get what they think they want out of his presidency.
- Okay, so let's get this straight: Trump kept saying he wouldn't honor the "One China" policy unless President Xi Jinping conceded to him on some points involving trade and international commerce. They had a phone conversation. President Xi said no. Trump quietly announced he would honor the "One China" policy. I had an agent like that one time.
- I'm not a big fan of doing psychological evaluations of public figures from afar and all these discussions of what's mentally wrong with Trump automatically trigger my skepticism. But I will admit most public figures don't give us anywhere near as much to work with as Trump does. John Cassidy engages in a little of that but makes the point that acting the way he does sometimes works well for Trump. I think that's important to remember. All the thing we may think he shouldn't do did get him the presidency.
Okay, that's four. And now I don't have to think about Trump for the rest of the day…or so I'll tell myself.