The news shows this week were dominated by speculation about Donald Trump’s legal troubles: Will Michael Cohen be indicted? If he is, will he flip and testify against Trump? If he does, what does he know? Will Trump fire Robert Mueller or Rob Rosenstein? Will Congress try to prevent that? Or if not, will it react after the firing happens? How?
If you watched TV news for more than a few minutes, it was easy to forget the most accurate answer to all these questions: We don’t know. The questions are all important, but at the moment there’s not a lot publicly available information about them. All week, it’s been hard to keep straight whether or not anything was actually happening.
One thing that did happen was that James Comey’s book A Higher Loyalty appeared in bookstores Tuesday. It turns to be a well-written and interesting book. You’d never figure this out from the coverage it’s been getting, but most of the book has nothing to do with Trump. It’s Comey’s story of his life in law enforcement, and the lessons about leadership that he draws from it. It turns out he’s been involved in lots of interesting events over the years, like putting Martha Stewart in jail or facing down Alberto Gonzalez over John Ashcroft’s hospital bed. It’s a good read.
So I’ll review that. The post should come out around 10 EDT.
That’s short, and the weekly summary will be correspondingly long: North Korea, anti-gun protests, Barbara Bush — and yes, Michael Cohen, Sean Hannity, the Mueller investigation and all that. I use Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Mar-a-Lago as an example of the everyday corruption of the Trump White House, point out the promising twist Paul Krugman has put on an old climate-change argument, and discuss a few other recent developments before finishing with a video of engineering students walking on water. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 