Paul Campos

A few weeks ago I got the idea of adding an appendix to my stupidity book, which would just be a list of various stupid things Donald Trump has said and done during his presidencies, with maybe a couple of particularly choice examples from the Before Time thrown in for emphasis. I ran this past my Michigan football board people, who thought it was great (People love lists! You will be the Suetonius of the Trümpenabfall.) So then I bounced it off you all, and you came up with dozens of great suggestions that I hadn't considered or had erased from my memory via protective repression.

Semi-seriously I know some of you are Third Stage Navigators in regard to travels in the Wingnut world, so I'm sure you can offer a useful translation or three of what any of this stuff means:

Michelle Goldberg's column ( free link ) about a couple of new novels whose plots revolve around the breakup of the United States uses the same trope I used a few days ago when discussing the same issue — that of an increasingly loveless marriage. This is in part because one of the novels — Kurt Andersen's “The Breakup” — employs the plot device of an actual marriage breaking up in the context of an ongoing national divorce:

I know it's getting extremely repetitive to the point of banality, but if any previous president had done this it would have been a massive scandal: ( free link)

OK everyone has been having a great old time with this Natalie Harp story but: (1) She's nuts

My wife is a legal immigrant to this country and works in a field America desperately needs more workers in. She did everything the right way and has never broken a law—not even a traffic ticket. Hell she has never called into or been late to work. She speaks excellent English and is getting better every day. She has a heart of gold and has made me a better person.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting.

This is a followup to yesterday's post about Hakeem Jefferies meeting with Jared Kushner covertly. The reactions to this development seemed to fall into two broad categories, which in turn reflected two fundamentally different perspectives on the current political situation.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.