So the great orange moron pulled us out of the Paris climate agreement, as expected. See also Trump just betrayed the world. Now the world will fight back.

Comedian Kathy Griffin posed with what looks like the severed head of Donald Trump. Although some are defending this as “performance art,” I say it was a boneheaded thing to do, and I won’t be sorry if she loses work because of it.

Suggesting violence toward a real, living person is stupid and reckless. “It was just a joke” is no excuse. It was wrong, and not funny, when Ann Coulter said “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee.” It was wrong when righties burned President Obama in effigy and erected billboards suggesting he should be lynched. Stooping to the Right’s level accomplishes nothing.

Here’s a post I wrote back in 2007 about humor as aggression. In it, I wrote that political art should be judged by the point it makes. Is the point true? Or is it just about mocking someone the artist doesn’t like? What point is Griffin making other than “I want Donald Trump dead”? There are copious things about Trump that are worthy of being mocked; why stoop to this?

I don’t like him, either, but I don’t want him dead. I want him investigated; I want his transgressions exposed; I want him out of office. If his maladministration is soundly ridiculed along the way, fine by me. But no, I don’t wish any physical harm to him. Maybe I’ve been a Buddhist for too long, but that’s how I feel.

Adding more hate and aggression into our political discourse accomplishes nothing. Roger Cohen wrote yesterday,

Tens of millions of Trump opponents cannot communicate with tens of millions of his supporters. There is no viable vocabulary. There is no shared reality.

This is the chasm to which Fox News, Republican debunking of reason and science, herd-reinforcing social media algorithms, liberal arrogance, rightist bigotry, and an economy of growing inequality have ushered us.

It’s perhaps the most important problem confronting the United States, because the end point of hardening fracture and mutual incomprehension is violence — like last week’s fatal stabbing of two men by a Muslim-insulting white supremacist on a Portland commuter train.

America is full of enraged people just looking for an excuse to act out their rage. Feeding the rage is irresponsible. Political expression that expresses nothing but hate or a wish for violence is self-indulgent and stupid.

It’s almost not worth blogging the Trump-Russia scandal, because as soon as I have an angle to blog about a new story comes out that changes things. Watergate oozed along at a snail’s pace; this story moves at light speed.

In more or less reverse order — the most recent headline is that Trump’s personal lawyer has refused requests from both the House and Senate investigations for more information.

President Donald Trump’s longtime ally and personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has refused congressional requests to provide “information and testimony” pertinent to their investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, ABC News reported Tuesday.

“I declined the invitation to participate as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered,” Cohen told ABC via email of the requests for his contacts with Kremlin-linked officials.

Josh Marshall says that the investigators’ interest in Michael Cohen is “very bad news for Donald Trump.”

In simple terms, whatever happened during the 2016 campaign, if I wanted to understand Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the countries of the former Soviet Union and money from those countries and emigres from those countries, there’s no single person I’d want to look at more closely than Michael Cohen.

Read the article for all the ways Cohen has been a significant link between Trump and Russia. He’ll get a subpoena eventually.

Earlier today, CNN reported that Russians had bragged about owning Trump:

Many could not help but notice how the so-called president was all smiles with the Saudis and all scowls in Europe. Why so nasty with the Europeans?

Notice that Josh Marshall wrote this before the news about Jared Kushner broke yesterday.

President Trump’s visit to Brussels/Europe wasn’t just another grab bag of impulsive aggression and gaffes. It wasn’t scattershot. It was quite clearly focused on destabilizing and perhaps eviscerating the NATO Alliance and somewhat secondarily, but relatedly, the European Union. This has been the strategic goal of Russia and before it the Soviet Union for decades. The sum total of everything that happened on this trip casts the entire Trump/Russia story in a decidedly more ominous light.

And the light was already quite ominous.

This is a significant point, I think:

On virtually every other issue he is almost infinitely malleable and susceptible to blandishments and praise. Except this one. Here he remains fixed on True North.

Remember, we went through the NATO Thing when Angela Merkel allegedly set him straight about his nutty idea that Germany owed NATO dues to the U.S. Trump appeared to soften his anti-NATO position, for a time. This happened just as The Atlantic was publishing a major feature called “Trump’s Plan to End Europe,” by David Frum. The Atlantic added a disclaimer to the article, but frankly, they needn’t have bothered. In Brussels this week Trump gave an ungracious speech, scolding allies for being cheapskates and refusing to explicitly reaffirm Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which states that an attack on any member is an attack on all. Trump is the only U.S. president since NATO was founded who has not clearly stated commitment to Article 5.

Frum pointed out that Trump has surrounded himself with anti-European Union ideologues, such as Steve Bannon.  (I saw a PBS program on Bannon last week. Bannon strikes me as a man of mediocre intellect and with an adolescent’s simplistic view of the world, who has nevertheless set himself up as an “expert” because he is so supremely sure of himself, and because as a white man he gets benefits of doubts. Watching it made me think of the Kevin Klein character from A Fish Called Wanda. Except Bannon isn’t funny.) And that reminded me of something I quoted earlier this week by Josh Marshall:

Trump used a very high profile and public moment to chastise our NATO allies for not paying enough for their own defense and actually owing the US vast sums of money. As I explained below, this is demonstrably false, both in a general and specific sense. Beyond the inaccuracy, Trump’s comments clearly envision a transformed and debilitated NATO, one that is one half protection racket, one half high-dollar membership golf resort. You pay your dues or you’re out. It’s a service, not a commitment.

Trump also declined to pledge his support for Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the provision that commits all members states – but most importantly the US – to defend members who are attacked. Article 5 isn’t a key part of NATO. It’s the cornerstone. In many respects it is NATO.

Meanwhile, a report in der Spiegel suggests Trump viciously attacked German and its export practices in a meeting of NATO/EU leaders. His team also created confusion among their EU interlocutors by appearing not to understand that EU member states only make trade deals as a group. It’s a bit hard to decipher precisely what was being discussed here. Was this really a misunderstanding or a bullheaded effort to make a point?

See also an article Anne Applebaum wrote back in July 2016:

Russia is clearly participating in the Trump campaign. The theft of material from the Democratic National Committee a few weeks ago was the work of Russian hackers. Russian state media and social media, together with a host of fake websites and Twitter accounts with Russian origins, actively support Trump and are contributing to some of the hysteria on the Internet. I’m not arguing that any of this has been decisive. But whatever resources Putin wagered on Trump, they are paying off.

For even if Trump never becomes president, his candidacy has already achieved two extremely important Russian foreign policy goals: to weaken the moral influence of the United States by undermining its reputation as a stable democracy, and to destroy its power by wrecking its relationships with its allies. Toward these ends, Trump has begun repeating arguments identical to those used on Russian state television. These range from doubts about the sovereignty of Ukraine — earlier this week, Trump’s campaign team helped alter the Republican party platform to remove support for Ukraine — to doubts about U.S. leadership of the democratic world. The United States has its own “mess” to worry about, Trump told the New York Times on Wednesday: It shouldn’t stand up for democracy abroad. In the same interview, he also cast doubt on the fundamental basis of transatlantic stability, NATO’s Article 5 guarantee: If Russia invades, he said, he’d have to think first before defending U.S. allies.

Putin wants Europe undermined. A suspicious person might think Trump is working for Putin.

I swear, I can’t keep up. If I did nothing but post on the latest scandalous thing out of Washington, I couldn’t keep up.’

WaPo reporters Ellen Nakashima, Adam Entous and Greg Miller report that Jared Kushner tried to set up a secret communications backchannel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin.

It appears that Kushner wanted to block any monitoring of Trump’s activities by U.S. intelligence. Russian intelligence monitoring was, however, okay.

Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, son-in-law and confidant to then-President-elect Trump, made the proposal during a meeting on Dec. 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by U.S. officials. Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.

The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.

Note that Reuters independently came up with the same story.

WaPo also quotes U.S. intelligence officials saying that Kushner’s request “seems extremely naive or absolutely crazy.” Dear little Jared is in way over his head, my dears, as is his father in law.

Intercepts of Russian communications show Ambassador Sergey Kislyak said Kushner suggested setting up the secure backchannel and even proposed using communications equipment in stateside Russian diplomatic facilities, according to the report, which cited anonymous U.S. officials briefed on the intercepts.

Kislyak was taken aback by Kushner’s proposal to use Russian equipment, according to the Washington Post, and reported it to his superiors in Moscow in intercepted communications that U.S. officials later reviewed.

I have disliked Jared Kushner ever since he bought the once-great New York Observer and turned it into a glorified shopper/gossip rag for the Upper East Side. Everything about him screams privilege. Like his father in law, he’s been sheltered from ever learning his own limits.

Amber Phillips writes for WaPo:

Secret back channels. Meeting with the Russians. Forgetting to disclose your meetings with the Russians. (Kushner is just one of several current and former Trump campaign officials who held meetings with the Russians, then forgot to share those meetings.)

If the Trump campaign did not work with Russia to try to influence the election, they certainly had a lot of interactions with the Russians that they didn’t want the U.S. government and/or the public to know about.

Which raises the question: What reason would Kushner have to keep talks secret from the U.S. government, when his father-in-law was a month away from being the head of the U.S. government?

Well, yeah, that sums it up pretty well. Matt Ford and Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic, add.

The potential security implications of Kushner’s reported proposal, experts said, are significant.

“Both Flynn and Kushner are extremely naive if they think a covert communications channel can be set up at Russian diplomatic facilities in the U.S. without the FBI finding out,” said David Gomez, a former FBI agent and a fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security.

“It is inconceivable that a White House official who had done this, not at the president’s direction, would continue to work there,” said Hennessey. “What happens to Kushner now will be incredibly revealing about the extent to which political accountability and the rule of law continue to apply in the White House.”

In other words, if Kushner isn’t suspended from his position over the weekend … well, I’d be really surprised if he is. The concepts of “integrity” or “honor” or even “covering your ass” seem unknown to Trump and his tribe.

The so-called president has managed to disgrace us all at the NATO meeting in Brussels, even after the other nations had arranged to dumb it all down to accommodate him.

For example, here is is shoving aside the Prime Minister of Montenegro so he could be on the front row of the group photo.

He refused to schmooze with the other leaders:

Brutal details on Trump’s interactions with NATO peers. Far cry from obsequiousness & real sense of camaraderie, rebuilding in Saudi. pic.twitter.com/b9EDuKCSMp

— Akbar Shahid Ahmed (@AkbarSAhmed) May 25, 2017

But, in truth, these issues were the least of his offenses. He still seems to think the other NATO countries are deadbeats, for example.

Trump used a very high profile and public moment to chastise our NATO allies for not paying enough for their own defense and actually owing the US vast sums of money. As I explained below, this is demonstrably false, both in a general and specific sense. Beyond the inaccuracy, Trump’s comments clearly envision a transformed and debilitated NATO, one that is one half protection racket, one half high-dollar membership golf resort. You pay your dues or you’re out. It’s a service, not a commitment.

Trump also declined to pledge his support for Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the provision that commits all members states – but most importantly the US – to defend members who are attacked. Article 5 isn’t a key part of NATO. It’s the cornerstone. In many respects it is NATO.

Meanwhile, a report in der Spiegel suggests Trump viciously attacked German and its export practices in a meeting of NATO/EU leaders. His team also created confusion among their EU interlocutors by appearing not to understand that EU member states only make trade deals as a group. It’s a bit hard to decipher precisely what was being discussed here. Was this really a misunderstanding or a bullheaded effort to make a point?

It’s a bullheaded effort to make a point that the Trumpettes don’t understand themselves. But the Trumpettes are hardly in a position to be lecturing anybody.

If NATO allies were nervous about the United States’ commitment to Europe’s security before, they must be fuming now. The NATO summit comes as reports surface that British police are withholding intelligence from the United States after leaks to U.S. media about the Manchester bombing investigation, and weeks after Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russians about operations against the Islamic State. For all of Trump’s fire and fury about the United States getting the raw end of the deal from NATO, from an optics standpoint, it is the United States that is looking like the irresponsible partner.

We learned just a couple of days ago that the so-called president bragged to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte about two nuclear submarines positioned offshore of North Korea, which of course is now universal knowledge. And now Britain is furious because intelligence photos of the Manchester terrorist attack turned up in the New York Times. Britain believes the Times must have gotten those photos from the White House. The Times isn’t saying what its source was. But Trump has asked the Justice Department to investigate the “alleged” leaks, which I find amusing.

Michael Flynn is refusing to honor a Senate subpoena and is pleading the Fifth, a whole lot of news sources are saying. One suspects Flynn is guilty of something. One also suspects the “something” could implicate the Trump Administration.  Trump’s association with Flynn could bring him down, yet. Whatever he’s hiding from the Senate likely will come out eventually. (Do read this Politico piece on Robert Mueller; it will make you feel better.)

However, there’s someone else is the Trump Administration being looked at. There are credible reports that a senior White House adviser close to the so-called president has become a “person of interest” to the Justice Department. And there’s a lot of speculation that PoI is Jared Kushner.

Now WaPo and other sources are reporting that Kushner has kept 90 percent of his real estate holdings, which likely puts him at odds with ethics rules.

Kushner, 36, who is emerging as a singularly powerful figure in the Trump White House, is keeping nearly 90 percent of his vast real estate holdings even after resigning from the family business and pledging a clear divide between his private interests and public duties.

The value of his retained real estate interests is between $132 million and $407 million and could leave him in a position to financially benefit from his family’s business. …

… It is not clear from Kushner’s financial filings whether any of his holdings might intersect with his broad and evolving responsibilities in the White House. This week, Kushner has been close by the president during the administration’s first international trip, with stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, Belgium and Italy.

Kushner rejected a request by The Washington Post to review his ethics agreement with the White House, which would lay out the topics that he has pledged to avoid because of concerns about conflicts of interest. White House officials have said that it is a long-standing policy for the agreements to remain confidential.

Let’s review some other recent Jared Kushner news —

March 27: Senate Committee to Question Jared Kushner Over Meetings With Russians.

March 28: Russian banker who met with Jared Kushner has ties to Putin

April 6: Kushner Omitted Meeting With Russians on Security Clearance Forms

Given the Kushner family history as a pack of opportunistic grifters, odds are very long that baby-faced Jared couldn’t pass an ethics whiff test in a Chanel No. 5 factory.

The news from the tRumpus foreign tour, first stop, Saudi Arabia:

President Trump made a splashy debut on the world stage here Saturday, ushering in a new era in U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations by signing a joint “strategic vision” that includes $110 billion in American arms sales and other new investments that the administration said would bring hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs? That’s a lot of arms sales. But there’s more …

In addition to the security agreements, Jubeir said, U.S. business leaders here at an economic forum designed to coincide with Trump’s visit signed deals potentially worth more than $200 billion over the next 10 years.

Executives from a number of major U.S. companies unveiled investment partnerships with the Saudis, including Blackstone, a private-equity giant that announced a $40 billion infrastructure fund. Stephen A. Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chairman and chief executive, is close to Trump and leads the White House’s economic advisory council of CEO’s.

Jubeir also praised ExxonMobil, the energy behemoth that Tillerson ran until retiring to join the administration, as “the largest investor” in Saudi Arabia.

So this is really about oil? This is from Arab News:

Energy — one of Saudi Arabia’s strongest sectors — witnessed a number of announcements with a combined $22 billion worth of new deals signed during the forum by Saudi and American executives in the oil and gas industry.

A major funding boost for the largest oil refinery in the US was among a number of announcements in refining and petrochemicals signed on Saturday at the forum.

Saudi Aramco-owned Motiva Enterprises announced a landmark investment in the US totaling $12 billion with a likely additional investment of $18 billion by 2023.

It is estimated the deal will create approximately 2,500 additional jobs in the short term and a further 12,000 by 2023.

Announcing the deal at the Saudi-US CEO Forum, Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco, said: “Today we are investing in long-term job creation and the future of the refining industry in the United States, and we are delivering on Vision 2030 to expand the US-Saudi partnership,” he said. “The message is clear: the longstanding bonds between our two countries are reinforced by both the value and scale of today’s agreement.”

First off, somebody should tell the coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia that Trump just sold them down the river. In the short term, anyway, this investment promises to be the final nail in the coffin of the coal industry, seems to me. Coal technology won’t be able to compete.

But in the long term — I guess this means we’re not trying to phase out fossil fuels, huh? Wrong move.

I’m not happy about the arms part of the deal, either. Brian Schatz writes at Mother Jones:

As Donald Trump heads to Riyadh today on his first international trip as president, he brings with him a gift: a massive arms deal reportedly worth more than $100 billion for Saudi Arabia. According to Reuters, the deal is specifically being developed to coincide with the visit, where he will meet with Saudi leaders and discuss the war in Yemen. And its success seems to be crucial to the president, whose son-in-law Jared Kushner has personally intervened in the deal’s development. According to the New York Times, earlier this month, in the middle of a meeting with high-level Saudi delegates, Kushner greased the gears by calling Lockheed Martin chief Marilyn A. Hewson and asking her to cut the price on a sophisticated missile defense system.

Yep; Jared Kushner personally intervened to be sure the Arabs could get a better deal. Such a guy.

Other details of the package, though, have been somewhat shrouded in mystery—Congress, which will have to approve any new arms deal, has to yet to be notified of specific offerings—but it is said to include planes, armored vehicles, warships, and, perhaps most notably, precision-guided bombs.

It’s that last detail in particular that is making many in Washington sweat. The Obama administration inked arms deals with the kingdom worth more than $100 billion over two terms, but it changed course in its last months. As Mother Jones has regularly reported, the Saudi-led war against the Houthi armed group in Yemen has been fueled in part by American weapons, intelligence, and aerial refueling, and it has repeatedly hit civilian targets, including schools, marketplaces, weddings, hospitals, and places of worship. Civilian deaths are estimated to have reached 10,000, with 40,000 injured. In response, the Obama White House suspended a sale of precision-guided bombs to the country in December.

In lifting the suspension, Trump essentially is signalling the world that we’re okay with whatever Saudi Arabia does. Trump’s deal is going to face a big fight in the Senate, Brian Schatz writes. Even a number of Republicans have been appalled at what the Saudis have done in Yemen. Some are saying the sale would violate both the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act, although of course no one in the Trump Administration would care about those things.

See also Trump may be helping to create a famine in Yemen. Congress could stop him.

The so-called president is on his way to foreign places, where he will no doubt say really stupid things and continue to be an embarrassment to the nation. But until that happens, here are some other facepalm-worthy news items.

You remember a few days ago, when the House passed (with much fanfare but no Democratic votes) a health care act that was intended to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? And how Republicans, including the so-called president, celebrated and said See? We can accomplish stuff after all! It’s a win!

Well, maybe not. The bill never went to the Senate. It may never go to the Senate. The House may have to do it over.

Bloomberg News:

House Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t yet sent the bill to the Senate because there’s a chance that parts of it may need to be redone, depending on how the Congressional Budget Office estimates its effects. House leaders want to make sure the bill conforms with Senate rules for reconciliation, a mechanism that allows Senate Republicans to pass the bill with a simple majority.

Republicans had rushed to vote on the health bill so the Senate could get a quick start on it, even before the CBO had finished analyzing a series of last-minute changes. The CBO is expected to release an updated estimate next week.

In order to qualify as a reconciliation bill, a bill has to slice at least $2 billion off the federal budget. Otherwise, it has to go to the Senate as a regular bill, which makes it subject to filibuster.

We’re learning more about this week’s Big Woopsie — Trump’s meeting with Russian officials in the Oval Office. The New York Times has learned that Trump bragged to the Russians that firing FBI Director Comey had taken the pressure off.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

Guess again, sweetums.