Olivier Douliery-POOL/ZUMA
Today the Washington Post commemorates the five-year anniversary of one of our nation’s greatest scandals:
Meanwhile, for about the hundredth time, Josh Marshall says that Donald Trump is finally losing it:
Trump seems to be coming apart. Adam Smith said there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation. We’ve seen that it’s like that with Trump to at least a degree. Yet something seems different here. His chaos has intensified but intensified into monotony. And now his domestic chaos is generating an entirely different kind of economic and systemic chaos and breakdown abroad which he may not be able to control. Specifically, economic chaos abroad may chip away, slowly or abruptly, at his ability to maintain a meager popularity at home. We now seem on the verge of, if not an international crisis, than perhaps an abrupt economic slowdown that will be in significant measure driven by the president’s idiotic and impulsive behavior.
I’ll grant that Trump’s Twitter stream has been especially manic for the past month or two, and I don’t want to ascribe any deep Machiavellian purpose to it. Still, I wonder if, consciously or not, there’s method to the madness. With election season coming up, Trump needs a signature issue that ignites his base and also appeals to more moderate suburban voters. But what? One way of finding out is to fling an endless stream of mud against the wall until you finally find something that sticks. Maybe that’s what he’s doing.
