This won’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention or who saw Bob Corker’s tweet about adult day care at the White House, but The Washington Post is reporting that Donald Trump “threw a fit” when senior members of his administration tried to talk him out of decertifying the Iranian nuke deal. And so the aides, including National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, came up with a plan in which Trump could call the deal “an embarrassment” without actually killing it.
In California, the number of wildfires is up, the number of deaths continues to rise, the number of acreage burned is up, the number of homes lost keeps increasing and, as the winds whip with gusts up to 79 miles an hour, the fires, we’re told, are burning faster than the firefighters can run. Via The New York Times.
The video of his beating in Charlottesville by a group of white nationalists went viral. Now the 20-year-old black victim, DeAndre Harris, is facing possible charges of felony assault brought by a man described as a neo-Confederate. Via The Los Angeles Times.
Trump takes his latest tirade against so-called fake news a very concerning step forward: After NBC News’ report on his request to radically increase the number of American nukes, Trump said he thinks the government should go after the networks’ licenses. The president apparently doesn’t know that the FCC doesn’t license networks. Via The New York Times.
The questions about NBC News keep coming. Here are two. How did NBC miss out on the explosive Harvey Weinstein story that it had spent months investigating? And how did the story end up instead in the pages of The New Yorker? Via The New York Times.
From The National Review, Jonah Goldberg writes that the Weinstein scandal leaves a long trail of hypocrisy from left and right. For those keeping score at home, Goldberg did give Bill Cosby to the left, but it really doesn’t change the argument.
We did learn something quite important from the NBC News report that Trump asked his advisers to radically increase the number of American nukes. That’s apparently why Rex Tillerson said Trump was a “fucking moron.” Via Vox.
Frank Rich says in New York magazine that the Vichy Republicans who nod and remain silent after Bob Corker’s invocation of World War III don’t seem to understand that the proposed tax cuts may not survive a nuclear Armageddon.
For those around the world who hoped Trump’s decision to dump the Paris Accord was only about American politics, they now know better. Now it’s the Clean Power Plan and who knows what comes next? Via The New Yorker.
Long-read bonus: Yoni Appelbaum asks in The Atlantic whether the American idea can be rescued from the politics and disillusionment of the day. He asks because he’s far from certain it can.
Photo by Jake Guild, via Flickr: Creative Commons
