The Weekly Sift

Surprise! There’s a new trade war! This one is with Mexico, and Trump says it will last until the Mexicans solve his border problem.

We also had another mass shooting, but no one is even pretending this will lead to any action on guns.

Robert Mueller made his first public statement since … I’m not sure. Probably since he solved Cain-and-Abel case. Liberals reacted with disappointment, because all he did was repeat what he said in his report. Conservatives were outraged, because how could he say these terrible things they’d never heard before? Wasn’t he directly contradicting what AG Barr has been saying about Mueller’s investigation and everything Fox News has reported about it? How can he do that? Anyway, saying out loud the stuff that he wrote appears to have moved the public discussion towards impeachment.

Missouri’s last abortion clinic can stay open until at least tomorrow, so no worries there. Evidence emerged that the proposed citizenship question for the census is indeed part of a Republican scheme related to gerrymandering. (But will the Supreme Court care?) Jared Kushner’s Middle East Peace Plan is almost ready to announce. It’s the result of intense discussions with the Israeli government and more-or-less complete ignorance of anything the Palestinians want, but I’m sure that won’t be a problem.

All that will get covered in the weekly summary, which I’m hoping to put out by noon EDT. (I’ve made it back to the Central Time Zone this week, which is so close to Eastern it’s hardly worth mentioning.)

But the featured post doesn’t elaborate on any of that. Instead, I’m going back to Trump’s repetition of his self-description as a “stable genius” and trying to imagine how he justifies that in his own mind. True, he’s not a Rhodes scholar like Bill Clinton or a Harvard professor like Elizabeth Warren. He doesn’t speak a bunch of languages like Pete Buttigieg, and he doesn’t possess either the verbal skills of Barack Obama or the engineering chops of Jimmy Carter. But maybe those are just pointy-headed-liberal-elite notions of the signs of genius. Maybe when Trump looks in the mirror he sees a different kind of intelligence entirely.

I took a clue from a comment Trump made in one of his debates with Hillary Clinton. When she suggested he didn’t release his tax returns because they would show he had managed to avoid paying taxes, he said, “That makes me smart.” Once I realized that tax evasion is smart, I looked at Trump’s life and found all kinds of similar evidence of intelligence, which I pulled together into a piece called “What makes Donald Trump so smart?” That should be out before 9 EDT.