Jeffrey Toobin re-reads The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and finds much in it that parallels the Trump/Russia story…and much that Trump and his team could stand to learn.
Matt Taibbi — who won the pool on how many days before Anthony Scaramucci would be canned — says that there's really no way to work for this president. It's a lose/lose job no matter what you do.
Noah Millman elaborates on the kind of thing Taibbi's talking about. On the campaign trail, Trump used to say of some problem facing this country, "I alone can fix it." It's looking like he may have to fix these things alone.
What can Trump do about the situation with North Korea? Alex Ward runs down the options and they don't seem very promising. One does get the feeling that Trump supporters want him to be "really, really tough" but that they (and Trump) don't have any ideas about any courses of action other than to give tough-sounding speeches.
Daniel McCarthy, an editor at the American Conservative, explains why Trump fans stick with Trump. Says he, it's because they ain't going back to the days of George W. Bush so they have nowhere else to turn.
And Jonathan Chait thinks that Trump "has fully erased the boundary between legitimate conservatism and the most disreputable paranoid discourse on the far right." To support this president, you kind of have to buy into all sorts of looney beliefs and wear a chapeau made of Reynolds Wrap.