As we wait for Hurricane Florence to hit the east coast, Sen. Jeff Markley revealed that the Trump Administration raided the FEMA budget to pay to incarcerate children. Nearly $10 million was transfered from FEMA to ICE to pay for detention camps.

Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, said on MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” that the administration is taking money from “response and recovery” and “working hard to find funds for additional detention camps.”

FEMA has countered that the money specifically was taken from the agency’s budgets for travel, training, public engagement and information technology work, and not from the rescue and recovery budget.

“I would dispute the statement that this has no bearing on … addressing the challenges from hurricanes,” Merkley said.

You be the judge.

CNN received a copy of the document from Merkley’s office. It details the effects the transfer would have on FEMA’s operations and from where in the budget the money would come.

“FEMA will curtail training, travel, public engagement sessions, IT security support and infrastructure maintenance, and IT investments in the legacy grants systems for transition to the Grants Management Modernization Program,” the document reads.

It still sounds like weakening FEMA, which was pathetic enough already, to pay for ICE.

And The Creature actually tweeted this morning,

We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2018

Literally nobody is giving Trump A Pluses for Texas and Florida, and the only reason Puerto Rico wasn’t Trump’s Katrina on steroids is that the networks couldn’t or wouldn’t do the same kind of real-time, up-close coverage they did in New Orleans.

Last month the Houston Chronicle reported on Harvey recovery in Texas.

It’s been nearly a year since Hurricane Harvey ravaged the region and for many the road to recovery appears to be mostly complete. They are back in their homes and upended lives are now mostly righted.

Then there are the others: the overlooked, the still-displaced, those who have been thrown into financial peril. They now suffer from unexplained medical problems, probably the legacy of slogging through contaminated floodwaters. Others battle with an anxiety that does not ease.

As the anniversary approaches, don’t tell them Hurricane Harvey is past.

As with most things in America, upscale areas were put right quickly while the poor and vulnerable were left to rot.

Nearly a quarter of those surveyed said their financial situation is worse, and 1 in 6 report their overall quality of life has gone down.

Four in 10 also said they are not getting the help they need to recover and rebuild their lives. Their biggest needs are housing, finances and help navigating the different assistance systems.

Not an A Plus. D plus, maybe. But Puerto Rico definitely is an F. Richard Wolffe:

After almost 3,000 civilians died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11 there were multiple hearings, investigations, reports and commissions. Everything from airport security to national security changed. But after a similar number of civilians died in Puerto Rico, there have been only two hearings with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (Fema) administrator.

That’s in spite of the multiple contracting debacles by Fema that we already know about. There was the $156m food contract that went to an Atlanta contractor with a single employee, whose track record was so bad that the company was supposedly barred from getting new government cash. That contractor handed the job to a wedding caterer, who unsurprisingly couldn’t handle the work.

Fema wrote an additional $30m contract for half a million tarps to protect people from the rain, but the tarps never arrived because the two brothers running the newly-formed company had no idea how to source them. That represented a third of Fema’s spending on tarps at the time.

In one hearing, Fema administrator Brock Long said those bungled contracts were just a handful among many thousands of good ones. Perhaps he’ll use the same excuse to respond to the recent report from the Government Accountability office, that found that more than half of Fema’s employees were unqualified to do their job after Maria. The agency also couldn’t find enough Spanish speakers to help out. We don’t know how many more Fema scandals there are because the GOP leadership in Congress refuses to investigate further.

So maybe taking nearly $10 million from FEMA doesn’t matter, because they probably would have pissed it off anyway.

Wolff also notes that the Red Cross spent less than half of the money it raised for Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico, and somehow managed to piss off a lot of what it did spend. I absolute do not ever give money to the Red Cross any more.

Finally, yesterday we learned another sad statistic — that FEMA received 2,431 requests for funeral assistance related to Hurricane Maria and approved only 75 of them. Maybe we should just abolish ICE and hand out all the money saved in the budget to the people of Puerto Rico. Not the government, directly to the people. With a letter of apology.

It has been truly said of John Bolton that somewhere there’s a cave full of bats wondering where their shit went. Ed Kilgore writes,

The U.S. has had an up-and-down relationship with the I.C.C. — founded to provide sanctions against individuals committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide — since it was founded by the Rome Statute in 1998. Bill Clinton signed the statute in 2000 but did not submit it to the Senate for ratification, saying he wanted to observe the I.C.C.’s record first. George W. Bush formally renounced any U.S. obligations to the court when it began operating in 2002. Barack Obama announced a policy of cooperation with the I.C.C. as an observer nation.

Now the pendulum is swinging back with a vengeance, as Bolton labeled the court “illegitimate” and “dead to us.”

“Dead to us”? The Guardian reported,

Bolton vowed that the United States would retaliate by banning ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the US, imposing sanctions on any funds they had in the States and prosecuting them in the American court system.

“If the court comes after us, Israel, or other US allies we will not sit quietly,” he said, also threatening to impose the same sanctions on any country that aided the investigation.

He condemned the inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan as an “utterly unfounded, unjustifiable investigation” and the court as illegitimate.

“We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead,” Bolton said.

He said the US would negotiate more binding, bilateral agreements to prohibit countries from surrendering Americans to the court in The Hague.

So Bolton is like …

And then, showing appreciation of the subtle finesse required to settle delicate international disagreements, the Trump Administration closed the PLO office in Washington, apparently to bully the PLO into caving to Israel. Yeah, sure, that’ll work.

Right now I feel as if we’re on an endless loop of Trump Is Awful and the country is completely bleeped up. What else is new? I’d like to believe that there’s a faint hope Kavanaugh, who has been thoroughly outed as a liar and partisan tool, won’t be confirmed. It could happen if all the Dems and just a couple of Republicans vote no, but we are repeatedly told that’s not going to happen.

And the possibiity of a solid Dem vote is considered even more unlikely than the couple of Republican votes. This is why the lame “rallying” cry “vote blue no matter who” doesn’t work for me.

Try to think of something cheerfull.

This happened this morning:

During a round of remarks before the questioning kicked off, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said he was going to release an email titled “racial profiling,” which the senator referenced Wednesday, that had been designated committee confidential.

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had complained that Democrats had been asking Kavanaugh about confidential documents without going through the process he laid out of getting permission to make them public.

“I come from a long line, as of all us do as Americans, of understanding of what that kind of civil disobedience is and I understand the consequences, so I am, before your process is finished, I’m going to release the email about racial profiling,” Booker said. “And I understand that the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate.”

Also:

After Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said he was willing to violate Senate rules and release confidential documents, Senate Democrats on the committee appeared in open revolt as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) read aloud from the rules on expulsion. Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, also tweeted the rules on Thursday morning.

Cornyn read aloud from rules stating that a senator who discloses “the secret or confidential business” of the Senate could be “liable … to suffer expulsion.”

Booker responded by saying: “Bring the charges.” His comment was echoed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who said: “Apply the rule, bring the charges. All of us are ready to face that rule.”

“This is about the closest I’ll ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” Booker said.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) also joined in, saying: “If there’s going to be some retribution against the senator from New Jersey, count me in.”

Their comments were echoed by Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who tweeted during the debate: “I stand w/ Judiciary Committee Democrats who are well within their rights to release these very important documents that a former Kavanaugh deputy designed as ‘committee confidential.’ The American ppl deserve to know the truth about Judge Kavanaugh’s record. #WhatAreTheyHiding?”

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been protesting the extraordinary secrecy and changes from standard procedure surrounding Kavanaugh’s paper trail. Republicans clearly are determined to railroad Kavanaugh’s approval, apparently believing he wouldn’t survive an open and deliberate process even with a Republican majority in the Senate.

One leaked letter has made headlines for casting doubt on Kavanaugh’s claim about Roe v. Wade being “settled law,” but I think this is even more interesting.

In another document, Judge Kavanaugh expressed a critical view about some Department of Transportation affirmative action regulations, writing:

“The fundamental problem in this case is that these DOT regulations use a lot of legalisms and disguises to mask what is a naked racial set-aside,” he wrote, adding that he thought the court’s four conservative justices at the time would probably “realize as much in short order and rule accordingly.”

[Read the email.]

Still another includes language about Native Hawaiians that could prove problematic not only to Hawaii’s two Democratic senators but to Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, a key swing vote who guards the interests of Native Alaskans. In the email, Mr. Kavanaugh questions Native Hawaiians as a protected group like Indian tribes. He wrote that prepared testimony “needs to make clear that any program targeting Native Hawaiians as a group is subject to strict scrutiny and of questionable validity under the Constitution.”

Anyway, I would like to see Chuck Grassley expel all the Democrats on the committee. There isn’t anything democratic about this nomination, and they might as well admit it.

I don’t know who wrote the anonymous op ed in the New York Times, but boy howdy, it sure pushed Trump over the edge.

TREASON?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2018

Does the so-called “Senior Administration Official” really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2018

Of course it’s not treason. It’s arguably not all that partiotic, either, but not because it’s disrespectul of The Creature. There’s nothing “patriotic” about continuing to cover The Creature’s ass. Charles Pierce:

Enough of this stuff. Stand up in the light of day and tell your stories. All of them, right from the beginning. Admit that what you’re confronting now is the end result of 40 years of conservative politics and all the government-is-the-problem malfeasance you’ve been imbibing since you were wingnuts in swaddling. The fire’s licking at your ankles at last. Come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls. None of you are heroes.

There’s a lot of guessing about who anonymous is. Lots of votes for Mike Pence, even though he doesn’t quite fit the Times’s description of a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. Pence can’t be fired, and his job can’t very well be jeaopardized.

On the other hand, Pence being an ambitious, unscrupulous weasel, he would be the one person most interested in planting the notion of getting rid of Trump via the 25th Amendment. He must realize by now that the only way he’s going to be president is if Trump is deposed first.

Otherwise, there’s nothing in the op ed that’s shockingly new. It’s all been pretty obvious, including the part about how the Administration is running on two tracks. It’s not at all unusual for the White House/Washington bureaucracy to fail to follow through on Trump’s policy announcements.

Anonymous wrote,

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Charles Pierce:

Jesus H. Christ on an auto-glass ad, everybody who watched him for 11 seconds on the campaign trail figured this out. You’d have to have had the brain of a marmoset not to be convinced of this back in 19-goddamn-79. More than 60 million people voted for him anyway. You took a job with him. When the scales fall from your eyes, make sure they don’t hit you in the feet.

Anonymous:

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

This is self-serving crap. There is no Constitutional crisis involved in removing Trump from office via the 25th Amendment if not impeachment. Anonymous just wants to be a good party apparatchik.

I don’t want to even read about the Kavanaugh hearings. We all know that every Republican will vote to confirm the clueless anti-labor, pro-big money in elections, anti-reproductive rights establishment dweeb, so what’s the point? If I’m wrong I’ll be delighted, but in the meantime let’s talk about something more cheerful.

Today the FiveThirtyEight nerds upgraded the Dems’ chances of retaking the House to four out of five, or 79.5 percent. It had been five out of seven for awhile. Four out of five is the best odds they’ve given the Dems this election cycle. Trump’s approval also is moving into the “getting worse” column, but it’s not yet quite as bad as his all-time worst.

The Senate, alas, probably is out of reach.

Possibly as a sign of the times, a local car dealership ran a television ad telling people to come in and buy a new car before Trump’s tariffs raise the prices. I only saw it once; maybe people complained. But if even “normal” folks in Trump Country get a clue that his policies are raising the cost of living, that’s going to hurt Republicans more than a hundred political ads.

Scott Clement and Dan Balz write in WaPo that the midterms are shaping up into a referendum on Trump.

Two months ahead of the midterm elections, Democrats hold a clear advantage over Republicans in congressional vote support, with antipathy toward President Trump fueling Democratic enthusiasm, even among those in the party who stayed home four years ago, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.

The survey also points to broad unrest and frustration with the political system generally. More than 6 in 10 Americans say Trump and the Republican Party are out of touch with most people in the country. While Democrats fare better, a narrower 51 percent majority also judged them out of touch.

The new Dem Party rallying cry — We’re not as out of touch as they are!

Ironically, the GOP’s weak position comes even as 58 percent of Americans say the economy is excellent or good, tying ratings from January as the most positive marks in 17 years.

We can quibble over what constitutes “good.” All the talking heads on the teevee keep saying the economy is “good,” so it must be “good,” but that doesn’t mean that the sort of “good” it is makes any difference to most people. The cost of living is heading up; wages, especially for blue-collar workers, are going down. That’s “good”?

Greg Sargent writes,

A new Post-ABC News poll strongly suggests that this kind of talk from Trump is only hurting Republicans, particularly in many of the GOP-held districts that Democrats need to win to take the House: It finds that a solid majority of voters wants a Democratic-led House to act as a check on Trump. And it finds a big swing in this direction since July.  …

… Notably, the Post-ABC poll also finds that by 60-34, voters want a Democratic-controlled Congress to act as a check on Trump as opposed to a Republican-controlled Congress that will support Trump’s agenda. This is up from 52-38 in mid-July, a swing of 12 points toward wanting a check on Trump. (Previous polls have found that majorities in the competitive House districts want this as well.)

What’s more, the new Post-ABC poll suggests that the anti-Trump backlash we’ve seen throughout this cycle among suburban, college-educated and independent voters is running strong: According to the cross-tabs, college-educated whites want a Democratic-led Congress as a check on Trump by 62-34, and suburban voters want the same by 58-37. Independents want a check by 63-27.

In other news: Bob Woodward has a new book out, or about to be out, and this one’s about the Trump Administration. It sounds as if the entire White House staff does little else but try to manage Trump.

A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead.

Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.

Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.

At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

Also: Recent tweet by Trump slamming Jeff Sessions just adds to Mueller’s obstruction of justice case.

For years I’ve heard that Lindsey Graham was John McCain’s “best friend” in the Senate. Does it mean anything that Miz Lindsey wasn’t invited to be a speaker at the funeral? He did give a Gospel reading, so maybe I’m reading too much into that. But don’t miss Dana Milbank’s “Rest in peace, Lindsey Graham.”

Graham remains alive and well, but after serving for two decades as Robin to McCain’s Batman, Graham buried whatever remained of his own reputation for iconoclasm even before his partner’s funeral.

On Tuesday, Graham took a seat on the couch of “Fox & Friends,” President Trump’s favorite show, and sealed his transition from apostate to Trump apparatchik.

“Word of caution to the public,” he said. “A lot of people try to convict President Trump. Don’t be so fast. I have seen no evidence of collusion after two years.” Having echoed Trump’s no-collusion line (as if that were the lone issue), Graham, a former military lawyer, picked up Trump’s attack on the justice system: “Plenty of corruption at the Department of Justice and the FBI. Should be stunning. Not one Democrat seems to care.”

Graham also has withdrawn support from Jeff Sessions. Graham isn’t as crazy/stupid as a lot of other wingnuts; he’s more calculating than crazy. Apparently he’s adopted Trump as his new “batman,” looking ahead to his senate re-election campaign in 2020. But if Trump goes down, Graham might also.

Well, as Brick said in the Tennessee Williams play about the cat and the roof, “Mendacity is a system that we live in.” That could be Lindsey Graham’s motto. He should have it needlepointed on some throw pillows.

In other news, the Kansas Supreme Court has created a wrinkle in Kris Kobach’s gubernatorial bid.

Kobach really does have a bug up his butt about blocking the Wrong Sort of Person (Democrats? Nonwhites? Anyone under the age of 40?) from voting.

Following up on the last post about the NAFTA mis-negogiations, the Toronto Star reporter, Daniel Dale, is saying that he did not get the quotes of Trump talking smack about Canada from the Bloomberg reporters. But that means the leak came from someone else in the room.

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweeted:

This literally never happens, that the OTR portions of these interviews leaks. Most people close to White House have raised possibility that Trump ordered it put out. https://t.co/tDHFpsT6KK

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 31, 2018

… which comes under the heading of “Evidence That Trump Is Even Dumber Than He Seems.” What did he possibly think he could accomplish by insulting Canada?

Update: Here’s one more — Paul Manafort’s daughter has filed to officially change her name. That’s cold.

Trump blew the Friday deadline for sending a revised “just don’t call it NAFTA” deal to Congress. As explained a few days ago, if Trump’s going to get a new NAFTA deal before the new Mexican president is inaugurated, he needed to get something to Congress to approve by yesterday. And he didn’t.

The sticking point appears to have been some Trump tough talk about Canada that leaked out. A “just don’t call it NAFTA” deal could still be salvaged if he can get the complete text of a final deal — not a preliminary one — to Congress by the end of September, this article says. But if he can’t get Canada on board he can kiss that off. It’s unlikely Congress would approve a “half NAFTA” deal, and the current president of Mexico has indicated he wants Canada in on the current deal.

Daniel Dale wrote for the Toronto Star:

Trump made his controversial statements in an Oval Office interview with Bloomberg News on Thursday. He said, “off the record,” that he is not making any compromises at all with Canada — and that he could not say this publicly because “it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.”

“Here’s the problem. If I say no — the answer’s no. If I say no, then you’re going to put that and it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal … I can’t kill these people,” Trump said of the Canadian government.

In another remark he did not want published, Trump said that any deal with Canada would be “totally on our terms.” He suggested he was scaring the Canadians into submission by repeatedly threatening to impose tariffs on imports of Canadian-made cars.

“Off the record, Canada’s working their ass off. And every time we have a problem with a point, I just put up a picture of a Chevrolet Impala,” Trump said. The Impala is produced at the General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ont.

Bloomberg agreed to the off-the-record request. Nobody has said how the Toronto Star got the quote. But then the box of rocks for brains in the White House tweeted:

Wow, I made OFF THE RECORD COMMENTS to Bloomberg concerning Canada, and this powerful understanding was BLATANTLY VIOLATED. Oh well, just more dishonest reporting. I am used to it. At least Canada knows where I stand!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2018

Pretty much confirming that, yeah, that’s what he said.

Trump wants to believe he doesn’t need Canada.

Days of high-stakes talks between Canada and the US have faltered, failing to yield a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) before a Friday deadline set out by Washington.

On Saturday morning, Donald Trump tweeted: “There is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal. If we don’t make a fair deal for the U.S. after decades of abuse, Canada will be out. Congress should not interfere w/ these negotiations or I will simply terminate NAFTA entirely & we will be far better off.”

The next question is, can he do that? Unlike the Paris climate agreement, NAFTA is legislation passed by Congress. And for that reason, it appears Congress could block him.

Under NAFTA rules, Trump can unilaterally withdraw from the agreement by giving Mexico and Canada six months’ notice. But Congress also has a say, since it ratified and implemented the agreement through legislation. Congress can fight to keep that legislation — the rules governing the way that the US trades with Mexico and Canada under NAFTA — intact. It can also pass new laws designed to boost its own authority over trade agreements. It may even be able to pass a law that preemptively eliminates Trump’s ability to unilaterally give Canada and Mexico notice of withdrawal.

If Congress was able to pass any of these bills, Trump would be in a tough situation. He’d risk a rupture with huge swaths of the GOP if he vetoed the bill. And if they formed a veto-proof majority, he’d be neutered by his own party on one of his key policy priorities.

And Republicans don’t want NAFTA to end. They really, really don’t; their corporate backers and armies of lobbyists are striving mightily to keep NAFTA alive. Democrats are said to be more ambivalent (I question that), but even those who don’t love NAFTA don’t want it to end abruptly because of the chaos that would cause.

Seems to me Trump is setting himself up for a cascading and catatrophic fail. Without Canada, he’s probably screwed with the “just don’t call it NAFTA” project. Congress could very well decide not to approve a “half NAFTA.” Mexico might even decide to withdraw from the preliminary agreement without Canada, in which he wouldn’t even have a side deal. If he tries to withdraw unilaterally, Republicans in Congress are going to have to choose between the corporate donors/lobbyists and Trump.

I believe Trump would lose that one, although it’s hard to say. How much political capital does he have right now? The events surrounding John McCain’s death have highlighted how abnormal he is. Polls are not exactly doing in his direction. More bombshells from the investigations will go off. But enough congressional Republicans may want to hang in with him until after the midterms that they won’t want to cross him on this.

From my Facebook friend Jeff Tiedrich:

Among the several deranged things Trump tweeted this morning was this:

What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks – with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2018

I have no memory of Lester Holt getting caught “fudging” any tape. Trump appears to be refering to the May 2017 interview in which Trump admitted he fired James Comey because of “this Russia thing.” NBC News has the entire, unedited video online.

It’s kind of fascinating that the Id in the White House brought this up today, more than a year later. Greg Sargent writes that people around The Creature believe he is vulnerable to impeachment on obstruction of justice charges, and I bet someone tried to explain to him why what he said to Lester Holt would become Exhibit A.

Naturally, in the Creature’s tiny mind, the facts must be re-arranged so that he never said it.

I believe I’ve already said that I doubt the House Democrats, assuming they take over the majority next year, will make a serious attempt to impeach Trump as long as there’s no chance he would be removed from office by the Senate. Nor should they, until enough Republican senators are on board with getting rid of him. But they will do everything short of that to destroy him politically, starting with releasing his tax returns. Heh.

The minions and toadies trying to protect The Creature are worried that he is not prepared for what’s likely to come at him from a Democratic House:

President Trump’s advisers and allies are increasingly worried that he has neither the staff nor the strategy to protect himself from a possible Democratic takeover of the House, which would empower the opposition party to shower the administration with subpoenas or even pursue impeachment charges.

Within Trump’s orbit, there is consensus that his current legal team is not equipped to effectively navigate an onslaught of congressional demands, and there has been broad discussion about bringing on new lawyers experienced in white-collar defense and political scandals.  …

… Still, Trump has not directed his lawyers or his political aides to prepare an action plan, leaving allies to fret that the president does not appreciate the magnitude of what could be in store next year. …

… One adviser recalled recently telling Trump, “They will crush you if they win. You don’t want them investigating every single thing you’ve done.”

The article goes on to say that Trump hasn’t seemed to have accepted the probability that the Dems will re-take the House. But we know it worries him, because he’s such a totally unfiltered id. His finances may be hidden, but whatever goes on in his psyche is as obvious as a wart on a nose.

Take Trump’s recent White House meeting with evangelical leaders, for example.

US President Donald Trump, facing scrutiny for hush money payments to a porn star and a former Playboy model, pleaded with evangelical leaders for political help during closed-door remarks on Monday, warning of dire consequences to their congregations should Republicans lose in November’s midterm elections.

“This November 6 election is very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment. It’s a referendum on so much,” Trump told the assemblage of pastors and other Christian leaders gathered in the State Dining Room, according to a recording from people in the room.

“It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s a question that they will overturn everything that we’ve done and they will do it quickly and violently. And violently. There is violence. When you look at Antifa — these are violent people,” Trump said, describing what would happen should his voters fail to cast ballots. “You have tremendous power. You were saying, in this room, you have people who preach to almost 200 million people. Depending on which Sunday we’re talking about.”

Never mind that the violence part is nonsense. Never mind that Al Gore got into all kinds of trouble for making campaign phone calls from the White House, and here Trump was holding a campaign rally in the Oval Office. Let us put that aside. What’s fascinating about this is that it tells us what’s weighing on Trump’s psyche. He’s afraid. He wants his buddies the evangelical leaders to affirm his fear and make the scary things go away.

He showed us another glimpse into the Twilight Zone in his head by claiming to the evangelical leaders he had “got rid of” the Johnson Amendment, which bans churches from endorsing candidates.

“Now one of the things I’m most proud of is getting rid of the Johnson Amendment,” the president said, according to NBC News. “That was a disaster for you.”

But the law actually remains in place after an attempt to kill it last year was unsuccessful.

He did sign an executive order last year that eased enforcement of the Amendment, and maybe he thinks that was all it took to “get rid” of it.  I wanted to draw one of those consequence trees about what this claim might be telling us. At the top it would ask if Trump truly believed his executive order got rid of the Amendment. If Yes, that would lead to the conclusion he is mentally impaired; if No, he believed no one in the room would notice he was lying. And what conclusions might you draw from that? And that he was in the Oval Office urging evangelical leaders to break the law?

For some previews of Trump’s continuing psychological meltdown, see No Matter How Bad It Gets, Trump Will Never Give Up.

U.S. President Donald Trump makes motorboat noises. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque – RC1D94FA7CB0

Oklahoma state government has been run by the fracking industry in recent years. But maybe not for long. The state’s teachers got tired of being underpaid and seeing the education budget cut, year after year, to provide tax cuts for the energy industry. And they struck back.

They promised to make lawmakers pay for refusing to finance broader investments in education with larger tax hikes. “We got here by electing the wrong people to office,” Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, told the New York Times in April. “We have the opportunity to make our voices heard at the ballot box.” Hamm and his fellow gas giants (almost certainly) made an equal and opposite vow — that those few Republicans who held the line against tax hikes of any kind would not regret their bravery.

Last night, Oklahoma’s GOP primary season came to an end — and the teachers beat the billionaires in a rout. Nineteen Republicans voted against raising taxes to increase teacher pay last spring; only four will be on the ballot this November.

I say this tells us that the right issue really can be used as a wedge to pry corporate-captured legislators out of their seats.