In a meeting to discuss immigration policy with Democratic lawmakers, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly set the record straight on a few things — some of Trump’s immigration campaign promises were “uninformed,” there will be no wall built across the entirety of the Mexican border and that, however much of the wall is built, Mexico won’t be paying for it. And then there’s more. Via The Washington Post.
If it seemed a little strange for Lindsey Graham, of all Republicans, to suddenly be sucking up to Donald Trump, that’s because it was more than strange. But now that we understand why Graham did it — he was trying to make an ally of Trump in order to get a Dreamer bill passed — that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a spectacular failure. Via The New Yorker.
From The National Review, Ben Shapiro writes that Trump may or may not be a racist, but asks whether there any journalistic justification for labeling him as one.
Trump’s fake news awards were pretty obviously a bust (as nearly all journalistic enterprises gleefully reported), and Vox takes a look at the “winners.” Meanwhile, here’s the CSPAN video of Jeff Flake’s speech condemning Trump’s attacks on the press (with a comparison to Stalin, no less). And John McCain’s op-ed on the topic in The Washington Post.
If you want to know how worried Republicans are about a wave election come November, suddenly they’re panicking about a special election for a House seat in Western Pennsylvania in a district that Trump carried by 19 points. Via The New York Times.
Some African countries might well be shitholes, writes Dayo Alopade in Foreign Policy, but that’s because they’re ruled by men like Donald Trump.
The Olympic detente, in which North Korea and South Korea will march under the same flag, would seem to complicate American policy on North Korea. Via The New York Times.
Trump has a long history of paying for silence, and in the Trump-pays-off-porn-star story, the ploy once again seems to have worked. (By the way, for what other president would this story barely cause a ripple? Hint: none.) Via The Atlantic.
Gail Collins: Now we know directly from his doctor that Donald Trump can correctly identify a camel, does that mean he’s not a raging narcissist or that he knows anything about immigration reform? Via The New York Times.
Sarah Jones writes in The New Republic that the #metoo backlash now set in motion was as inevitable as it is familiarly depressing.
Photo by Herb Neufeld, via Flickr: Creative Commons
