Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare points out what Trump did to Rod Rosenstein and what Rosenstein did to himself.

Trump happily traded the reputation of Rosenstein, who began the week as a well-respected career prosecutor, for barely 24 hours of laughably transparent talking points in the news cycle. The White House sent out person after person—including the Vice President—to insist that Rosenstein’s memo constituted the basis for the President’s action against the FBI director. The White House described a bottom-up dissatisfaction with Comey’s leadership, which Rosenstein’s memo encapsulated and to which the President acceded. And then, just as casually as Trump and his people set Rosenstein up as the bad guy for what was obviously a presidential decision into whose service Rosenstein had been enlisted, Trump revealed that Rosenstein was, after all, nothing more than a set piece.

Trump used Rosenstein, Wittes says. Rosenstein knew it. He got the White House to correct the record and say that Rosenstein’s memo wasn’t the reason for firing Comey.

But.

The trouble is that while Rosenstein got what he wanted, Trump’s idea of correcting the record was to say publicly exactly the thing about a law enforcement officer that makes his continued service in office impossible: That Trump had used his deputy attorney general as window dressing on a pre-cooked political decision to shut down an investigation involving himself, a decision for which he needed the patina of a high-minded rationale.

Once the President has said this about you—a law enforcement officer who works for him and who promised the Senate in confirmation hearings you would show independence—you have nothing left. These are the costs of working for Trump, and it took Rosenstein only two weeks to pay them.

Wittes had a high opinion of Rosenstein, and thought his presence would keep the DOJ from being too terrible despite Jeff Sessions.

I was profoundly wrong about Rosenstein.

Rosenstein’s memo in support of Comey’s firing is a shocking document. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. I have tried six ways from Sunday to put an honorable construction on it. But in the end, I just cannot find one. The memo is a press release to justify an unsavory use of presidential power. It is also a profoundly unfair document. And it’s gutless too. Because at the end of the day, the memo greases the wheels for Comey’s removal without ever explicitly urging it—thus allowing its author to claim that he did something less than recommend the firing, while in fact providing the fig leaf for it.

Just one of Trump’s incidental kills.

Ok Trump is in a really really bad mood now and he’s not going to take it any more. You people have got to stop fucking up this way. Heads are gonna roll!

Mr. Trump’s appetite for chaos, coupled with his disregard for the self-protective conventions of the presidency, have left his staff confused and squabbling. And his own mood, according to two advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity, has become sour and dark, turning against most of his aides — even his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — and describing them in a fury as “incompetent,” according to one of those advisers.

Seriously! And they all have ridiculous hair, too!

He called his PR peeps in on Monday to tell them to shape up and stuff, but he also said they could still keep their jobs. He told other people a different thing though.

Even as Mr. Trump reassured advisers like Mr. Spicer that their jobs were safe at the morning meeting, he told other advisers he knew he needed to make big changes but did not know which direction to go in, or whom to select.

Why that sounds kind of like…incompetence.

Also there’s another problem: nobody is going to want that job. Nobody.

Later, reporters could hear senior aides shouting from behind closed doors as they discussed a defense after Washington Post reporters informed them of an article they were writing that first reported the news about the president’s divulging of intelligence.

They turned the tv up to drown out the yelling.

A dozen of Mr. Trump’s aides and associates, while echoing Mr. Trump’s defiance, privately agreed with Mr. Corker’s view. They spoke candidly, in a way they were unwilling to do just weeks ago, about the damage that was being done to the administration’s standing and the fatigue that was setting in after months of having to defend the president’s missteps, Twitter posts and unpredictable actions.

“After months” – people keep saying that. Yes technically it is months, since it’s more than one, but that would usually suggest a bigger number than three. Almost four. It’s only been almost-four. It’s a short time.

There is a growing sense that Mr. Trump seems unwilling or unable to do the things necessary to keep himself out of trouble, and that the presidency has done little to tame a shoot-from-the-hip-into-his-own-foot style that characterized his campaign.

What did they think would happen? Why did they expect anything else? He’s a bad, stupid, malevolent man; what the fuck made them think he would be anything else after he took office?

There is a fear among some of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers about leaving him alone in meetings with foreign leaders out of concern he might speak out of turn. General McMaster, in particular, has tried to insert caveats or gentle corrections into conversations when he believes the president is straying off topic or onto boggy diplomatic ground.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine being a serious grownup and having to try to manage that out-of-control monstrosity?

This has, at times, chafed the president, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Trump, who still openly laments having to dismiss his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has groused that General McMaster talks too much in meetings, and the president has referred to him as “a pain,” according to one of the officials.

He keeps telling Don to turn off the tv.

The Times reports it was Israel.

The classified intelligence that President Trump disclosed in a meeting last week with Russian officials at the White House was provided by Israel, according to a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information. The revelation adds a potential diplomatic complication to the episode.

Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and a major intelligence collector in the Middle East. The revelation that Mr. Trump boasted about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries. It also raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the Middle East.

Israeli officials declined to confirm.

In the meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, Mr. Trump disclosed intelligence about an Islamic State terrorist plot. At least some of the details that the United States has about the plot came from the Israelis, the officials said.

The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Israel previously had urged the United States to be careful about the handling of the intelligence that Mr. Trump discussed.

Yes but this is Russia we’re talking about, our dear dear friend Russia, who loves us so much and has our best interests at heart, not to mention Israel’s. Russia is a great friend to Israel, as well as to us. All this is just a super-friendly conversation among three close buddies.

Mr. Trump said Tuesday on Twitter that he had an “absolute right” to share information in the interest of fighting terrorism and called it a “very, very successful meeting” in a brief appearance later Tuesday at the White House alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

Erdogan. Of course.

“What the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” General McMaster said at a White House briefing, seeking to play down the sensitivity of the information Mr. Trump disclosed.

General McMaster added that the president, who he said was unaware of the source of the information, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to tell the Russians what he knew.

Wait. Why was Trump unaware of the source of the information? Because he didn’t read his briefings? Or because it’s one of the pieces the national security are keeping back from him because he’s so reckless? If it’s the second – doesn’t that just put the lid on it? He’s too dangerous for this job no matter what you do: if you give him the intel he blabs it, and if you don’t give him the intel he blabs it.

But General McMaster also appeared to acknowledge that Thomas P. Bossert, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, had called the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency after the meeting with the Russian officials. Other officials have said that the spy agencies were contacted to help contain the damage from the leak to the Russians.

General McMaster would not confirm that Mr. Bossert made the calls but suggested that if he did, he was acting “maybe from an overabundance of caution.”

An overabundance of caution? Really? I wonder if he’s consulted Israel on that.

Israel’s concerns about the Trump White House’s handling of classified information were foreshadowed in the Israeli news media earlier this year. Newspapers there reported in January that American officials warned their Israeli counterparts to be careful about what they told the Trump administration because it could be leaked to the Russians, given Mr. Trump’s openness toward President Vladimir V. Putin.

Oh well. At least we got those nice Oval Office photos out of the deal.

God damn. I was out getting Cooper wet and muddy and tired all afternoon, and I was just browsing Twitter and kicking back when I encountered the Post’s latest scoop. Donnie talked about top-secret shit with his Russian guests.

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

A source on IS, and Mister BewareoftheScaryMooslims blabs it because he’s showing off to the Russians.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Those must have been awkward conversations.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

No wonder they were grinning so hard in those photos that Trump didn’t realize they were going to make public.

One day after dismissing Comey, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — a key figure in earlier Russia controversies — into the Oval Office. It was during that meeting, officials said, that Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.

Oh gawd.

Because he’s prez, he didn’t do anything illegal. It’s just that it was a very bad thing to do, that’s all.

But officials expressed concern about Trump’s handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences. Exposure of an intelligence stream that has provided critical insight into the Islamic State, they said, could hinder the United States’ and its allies’ ability to detect future threats.

But no biggy, right? Certainly Trump has never expressed any alarm about Islamic State…

“It is all kind of shocking,” said a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials. “Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”

In his meeting with Lavrov, Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president said, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.

Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god. This is what we all knew would happen; this is the idiocy and engorged vanity that we knew would make it happen; but how is it possible that no one can stop this?

Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Well, on the day when ten passenger jets are blown out of the sky, we’ll know we have Trump to thank…unless we were on one of the planes.

The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia’s presence in Syria. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and perhaps disrupting it.

This is horrifying.

A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, “I don’t think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.”

At a more fundamental level, the information wasn’t the United States’ to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments — and even individual agencies — are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated, even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.

But we have an angry toddler as head of state, so that’s that.

The officials declined to identify the ally but said it has previously voiced frustration with Washington’s inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.

“If that partner learned we’d given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first, that is a blow to that relationship,” the U.S. official said.

Trump also described measures that the United States has taken or is contemplating to counter the threat, including military operations in Iraq and Syria, as well as other steps to tighten security, officials said.

And this is inevitable and will go on happening because he refuses to read the briefings that tell him not to do this kind of thing, and why.

Trump has repeatedly gone off-script in his dealings with high-ranking foreign officials, most notably in his contentious introductory conversation with the Australian prime ministerearlier this year. He has also faced criticism for seemingly lax attention to security at his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago, where he appeared to field preliminary reports of a North Korea missile launch in full view of casual diners.

U.S. officials said that the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders, but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points — and often ignores those.

“He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it, and that has big downsides,” the second former official said. “Does he understand what’s classified and what’s not? That’s what worries me.”

I keep saying – many people keep saying – this level of stupidity is dangerous in a president.

This shit has seriously got to stop.

The funniest first paragraph I’ve read so far today:

Donald Trump is embarking on a week of diplomacy and preparation for his first foreign trip as president, aimed at demonstrating that his personal charisma can override longstanding global divisions and conflicts of interest with old allies.

His wut?

Trump doesn’t have charisma; he doesn’t even lack charisma; he has whatever the opposite of charisma is. He’s a force that sucks all the charisma out of the air for miles in every direction. He’s repellent.

Trump’s personality-driven approach seeks to reassert US pre-eminence in the world through consolidating bonds with foreign leaders, most notably autocrats, as long as they are aligned with the administration’s priorities of defeating Islamic State and al-Qaida while containing Iranian influence. Pressure to observe human rights has been explicitly relegated as a foreign policy mission.

The president’s critics argue, however, that abandoning such values damages long-term US aspirations to global leadership. They warn that Trump’s overweening confidence in his own persuasive powers is simply delusional and will not help resolve intractable global conflicts and the often contradictory aims of his own foreign policy objectives.

And even if he were right about his persuasive powers, what good are they if he has all the wrong goals? But he’s not right about them, so we don’t really need to contemplate that question.

[National Security Adviser HR McMaster] laid out the agenda for Trump’s trip, which starts with visits to the ancient capitals of Islam, Judaism and Christianity and culminates in Nato and G7 summits at the end of the following week, describing it in almost messianic terms.

“This trip is truly historic. No president has ever visited the homelands and holy sites of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths all on one trip,” McMaster said. “And what President Trump is seeking is to unite peoples of all faiths around a common vision of peace, progress, and prosperity.”

It will be like a visit from God, but more fun.

Trump’s week starts on Monday with a meeting in Washington with the Abu Dhabi crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, that is supposed to underline US backing for the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There is deep unease in the state department and the Pentagon about the UAE’s human rights record in its role as part of an Arab coalition against Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. But Trump is not expected to raise those concerns in his meeting with the sheikh.

Of course he’s not. What does he care about human rights? They don’t put money in his pocket.

Trump has already made clear he will not let Obama-era opposition to Erdoğan’s creeping authoritarianism become a hindrance in the bilateral relationship. He formally congratulatedthe Turkish president on winning a referendum amending the constitution to give him more power.

For its part, Turkey has also focused on cultivating a personal relationship with Trump. A meeting of Turkish and US business leaders starting next Sunday has been moved to the Trump hotel in Washington.

Putting a lot of money in Trump’s pocket. That’s the important thing.

The consistent message being conveyed in this week’s meetings, and then in the trips to Saudi Arabia and Israel over the weekend, is that US support for its traditional allies is personal and no longer has to be balanced by scruples about human rights or by the pursuit of detente with Iran.

“One of the main comparisons with Obama is that he seemed to be aloof. He didn’t take sides. His temperament was cerebral and over the fray,” said Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

“Trump is the opposite. He is partisan. He is saying he is on their side. He is saying: ‘We are not the UN. We are not Sweden. We are the US and we are your ally.’”

We like authoritarians and dictators.

I’ve seen a lot of references to the interview Trump did with TIME magazine as startling evidence of how…what to call it…under-equipped he is.

Here’s a sample on his first use of force:

I’ve been doing this, in all fairness, when I first came into the office, the first night. You weren’t here.

But they say sir, we’re ready to go. I said where? They had some people in a certain country, Yemen, where they had them [surveilled] and they needed the go ahead to kill, to kill them.

But in other words they wanted the right to go. So they’re telling me this. And this happened for two or three weeks, four weeks. And they keep coming to me, at weird times too. I don’t care about that.

And they’re in parts of the world that most people have never even heard about. They were in cities that nobody every heard about or towns. And in some cases they’re ISIS or al-Qaeda. And so they say sir, we have a situation we’d like to be able to go and they tell me what.

Then after about four or five weeks I said wait a minute. By the time they get to me, and I get back to them, usually it’s over anyway, it’s gone, they’re gone. They couldn’t fire. You know under the Obama Administration they get back to them three or four weeks later and say it’s okay to go. They say okay to go, they left three weeks ago.

Here’s some wisdom on China (or Chy-nah as he pronounces it):

You know I have a lot of respect for President Xi [Jinping]. I have great respect for him. I think we have a very good mutual liking of each other. And I told you we had tremendous dialogue at Mar-a-Lago.

And Mar-a-Lago is a great place for the dialogue because there’s a warmth to Mar-a-Lago that you just don’t find anywhere else. You can sit down in a chair and just talk for hours. Where in some places you don’t have that.

And this is great. I mean it’s very different. But you don’t have that here. It’s not the same. It’s great in a different way.

We’ve never had the relationship that we have now. Now, in all fairness to President Xi, he loves China, he loves his people, and he is representing the people of China. He’s not representing the people of the United States. So we’ll see how that all turns out.

On his genius at debt-collection:

You know we’ve gotten billions of dollars more in NATO than hat we’re getting. All because of me. I mean it’s not like a bragging thing, I’m just saying. If Hillary Clinton would have gotten in, she wouldn’t even know that we’re getting screwed by everybody.

But we have gotten billions of dollars more coming in. and coming in. I asked one simple question, I says is everybody paid up? An they bring their chart, and these countries haven’t paid for years. Haven’t paid a fair amount for years. Billions, and billions, and billions and billions of dollars. And we’re paying. We’re paying for it.

And they pay 2% and we pay close to 4%. And in all fairness it’s better for them than it is for us. It’s wonderful. But its better for them. And I get along great with Merkel. I got along great with all of them. I said folks, you gotta pay. You gotta pay.

In their story on Trump after hours, there’s a touching little item about joining him for dinner.

the Blue Room has been lit with nearly a dozen votive candles, the table is set with yellow roses, and the Washington Monument is neatly framed in the South window.

The waiters know well Trump’s personal preferences. As he settles down, they bring him a Diet Coke, while the rest of us are served water, with the Vice President sitting at one end of the table. With the salad course, Trump is served what appears to be Thousand Island dressing instead of the creamy vinaigrette for his guests. When the chicken arrives, he is the only one given an extra dish of sauce. At the dessert course, he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else.

What elegant manners.

Via Eneraldo Carneiro:

Nicholas Kristof asks if Don of That Outer Borough is obstructing justice.

For months, as I’ve reported on the multiple investigations into Trump-Russia connections, I’ve heard that the F.B.I. investigation is by far the most important one, incomparably ahead of the congressional inquiries. I then usually asked: So will Trump fire Comey? And the response would be: Hard to imagine. The uproar would be staggering. Even Republicans would never stand for that.

Oh ha no, Republicans will stand for anything. Trump could eat an infant on camera and they would tell us to move on.

Alas, my contacts underestimated the myopic partisanship of too many Republicans. Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, spoke for many of his colleagues when he scoffed at the furor by saying, “Suck it up and move on.”

Yeah suck it up. What’s the big deal? So Russia tilted the election to a malignant narcissist, so what? So the malignant narcissist just fired the guy leading the key investigation of that Russian activity, so what? Suckitupandmoveon.

Trump challenges the legitimacy of checks on his governance, bullies critics and obfuscates everything. Trump reminds me less of past American presidents than of the “big men” rulers I covered in Asia and Africa, who saw laws simply as instruments with which to punish rivals.

He’s our very own Mugabe.