Protect the children…except when it’s priests harming them.

In 33 states, clergy are exempt from any laws requiring professionals such as teachers, physicians and psychotherapists to report information about alleged child sexual abuse to police or child welfare officials if the church deems the information privileged.

That’s so interesting in the light of the fact that the Catholic church has a long long long and very full history of looking fixedly in the other direction while priests rape children.

This loophole has resulted in an unknown number of predators being allowed to continue abusing children for years despite having confessed the behavior to religious officials. In many of these cases, the privilege has been invoked to shield religious groups from civil and criminal liability after the abuse became known to civil authorities.

The very people most likely to take advantage of people’s trust to molest their children are the ones who get to tell the cops to take a hike.

Over the past two decades state lawmakers like Romero have proposed more than 130 bills seeking to create or amend child sex abuse reporting laws, an Associated Press review found. All either targeted the loophole and failed to close it, or amended the mandatory reporting statute without touching the clergy privilege amid intense opposition from religious groups. The AP found that the Roman Catholic Church has used its well-funded lobbying infrastructure and deep influence among lawmakers in some states to protect the privilege, and that influential members of the Mormon church and Jehovah’s Witnesses have also worked in statehouses and courts to preserve it in areas where their membership is high.

In Maryland a successful campaign to defeat a proposal that would have closed the clergy-penitent loophole was led by a Catholic cardinal who would later be defrocked for sexually abusing children and adult seminarians.

Hail Mary, eh?

“They believe they’re on a divine mission that justifies keeping the name and the reputation of their institution pristine,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, speaking of several religious groups. “So the leadership has a strong disincentive to involve the authorities, police or child protection people.”

Or to put it another way, they want to get away with it, and they use religious privilege to bully lawmakers into letting them. I don’t believe they believe it’s anything to do with any divine mission. They just want to protect themselves and their racket.

Commentary on CBS’s “study shows gender-affirming mastectomy is awesome” tweet is harsh.

Florida is about to get hammered.

Hurricane Ian is bearing down on the Gulf Coast of Florida as one of the strongest storms on record for the area. Its storm surge could be unlike anything seen there as the eye comes ashore, and forecasters are warning that Ian’s intense rainfall – which is expected to continue across the peninsula through Thursday, could lead to life-threatening floods.

Global warming=get out of Florida. It’s doomed.

Florida sees a lot of hurricanes, but not the biggest ones. This is a biggest one.

If Hurricane Ian makes landfall with maximum winds of 155 mph or stronger, it will be the most intense storm to ever make landfall on the west coast of the Florida peninsula.

The National Hurricane Center on Wednesday increased Ian’s storm surge forecast to 12 to 18 feet from Englewood to Bonita Beach, which would be something never seen in the region.

Storm surge is generated mainly by the hurricane’s strong winds, which blow from the ocean toward land and push huge amounts of water beyond the coast. Storm surge will likely be Ian’s most deadly aspect – 90% of hurricane-related deaths are water-related, according to the National Hurricane Center, and around 50% are caused by storm surge.

It was storm surge that drowned New Orleans.

Hurricane Ian rapidly intensified Wednesday morning. Its maximum winds increased from 120 mph to 155 mph in less than three hours, jumping from a Category 3 to a strong Category 4 in the process.

Rapid intensification is defined as a wind speed increase of 35 mph or more in 24 hours, and it has historically been a rare phenomenon. But scientists say it is becoming more likely for hurricanes as the climate crisis advances, pushing ocean temperatures higher and laying the groundwork for them to explode at a breakneck pace into deadly major hurricanes.

So that’s bad.

Also it’s going to settle down over Florida and dump rain for several days. Lots and lots and lots of rain.

“Widespread, life-threatening, catastrophic flooding is expected across portions of central Florida with considerable flooding in southern Florida, northern Florida, southeastern Georgia and coastal South Carolina,” the National Hurricane Center said Wednesday. “Widespread, prolonged major and record river flooding expected across central Florida.”

How much rain?

Rainfall rates will likely exceed 3 inches per hour on Wednesday, which could result in at least a foot of rain across central Florida, the center said. Rainfall will shift north on Thursday, putting Gainesville and Jacksonville at risk.

Yikes.

Also, it’s already been raining heavily for the past couple of weeks so rivers are already swollen.

This is going to be bad.

This is not something news organizations should be doing. It’s not news and it’s not truth, and it’s extremely harmful.

Top surgery drastically improves quality of life for young transgender people, study finds

The quality of life of young transmasculine people dramatically improves after receiving top surgery — a mastectomy procedure that removes breast tissue — according to a study by Northwestern Medicine.

What are “transmasculine people”? What is CBS doing talking silly political drivel like that?

The study, published in peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics on Monday, is the first to show that top surgery is “associated with significant improvement in chest dysphoria, gender congruence, and body image in transmasculine and nonbinary teens and young adults,” Northwestern Medicine said in a press release. 

The study compared two groups of patients ranging in ages from 14 to 24: one group of 36 patients received top surgery, and a control group of 34 patients received gender-affirming care, but did not get top surgery. Three months after surgery, the patients who had the procedure experienced significantly less chest dysphoria than they had prior to surgery, while patients in the control group experienced around the same levels of chest dysphoria as they had at the start of their care.

“Top surgery” “chest dysphoria” – you’d think it was a student newspaper, or else Private Eye.

The girls in the study were happy with their mastectomies, and the girls in the study who didn’t get mastectomies remained unhappy with their breasts. Here’s a funny thing though: a lot of girls don’t enjoy getting breasts, and find them annoying in various ways for varying lengths of time. Mostly, though, they get used to them. Some of them end up using them to feed a baby or several babies. Cutting them off young girls is a drastic step that the girls may come to regret in five or ten years. I’m not a bit sure CBS and JAMA Pediatrics are being helpful by encouraging girls to get their tits sliced off.

Women? Actually women? Not “people”?

The rights of women? Women??? Surely they mean people.

Remember that? It was only two weeks ago.

Have they changed their minds?

There are developments.

I don’t think the court did “sentence Sally Anne Dixon as a woman.” I don’t think that’s a thing. They sentenced Dixon under that name, but I doubt they attached “azza woman” or “ut femina” to the sentence. They sentenced this Dixon who currently calls himself a woman.

Anyway. It may be that Sussex Police were inspired to withdraw some of the Twitter insults by a Tory MP [and Home Secretary].

Even Tories are right some of the time.

From a thread on W-PATH and research failings –

11-12 are CRUCIAL:

That. Trans ideologues never stop yammering about “rights” but they also never bother to define what “rights” they’re talking about. In reality they’re generally talking about rights that aren’t rights, like a “right” to be “affirmed in one’s chosen identity” or to be “validated as who you really are.” This is more of the same. Even if there is a right to “gender-affirming health care,” (which is a very novel right if so), what about competing rights that even the person seeking “gender-affirming health care” has? The ones Gosling lists and other similar ones? Why is the purported right to “affirmation” presented as the only one that matters? Why don’t people look behind and around it?

The Telegraph reports on the Twitter quarrel between Sussex Police and uppity women:

Sussex Police has been criticised for saying it did not tolerate “hateful comments” to a member of the public who expressed gender critical views over a trans paedophile.

The force tweeted that Sally Ann Dixon, 58, had been jailed for 20 years for sexually abusing children in a seaside caravan.

Her trial heard that she was living as a man when she carried out a campaign of offending against two boys and five girls.

His. He. His trial, he was “living as” a man, when he carried out a campaign. This is a man’s crime. News outlets should not be obscuring this fact by referring to rapey men as “she.”

The force was criticised when it responded to [a woman’s] message saying: “Hi, Sussex Police do not tolerate any hateful comments towards their gender identity regardless of crimes committed. This is irrelevant to the crime that has been committed and investigated.”

When the Twitter user @Weatherwax6655 said she was “exercising my gender critical views, which are protected in law. Can you advise whether making such statements is a crime?”, the force added: “If you have gender critical views you wish to express this can be done on other platforms or your own page, not targeted at an individual.”

Which is nonsensical. We can express our views to the police on social media, too.

It’s not clear if “targeted at an individual” is supposed to mean the child molester or the Sussex Police staffer who runs the Twitter account, but either way it’s ludicrous. Yes we can point out that the child molester is a man and that Sussex Police can’t force us to lie about his sex. Yes we can.

Telegraph columnist Nick Timothy added: “This thread is incredible. Sussex Police first threatening a member of the public for misgendering a serial paedophile, now doubling down and insisting that airing gender critical beliefs must not be expressed on this platform.”

He’s not wrong.

Dixon was given consecutive nine-year custodial sentences with two one-year extended licences, and will serve at least 12 years in custody before becoming eligible for parole.

Dixon, who did not have a gender recognition certificate, will serve 20 years in a women’s prison for crimes between 1989 and 1996. The certificate is required for trans people to change their birth certificate.

Sure, that’s fine. Dump him on the women. Nobody cares what happens to women. Stupid bitches.

Another aspect of the Sussex Police dispute is that Sussex Police are blissfully unaware that sexism and misogyny exist.

Go look up hate crime on our website, they told us.

So I looked, and found what I expected to find. There’s a long list, but women aren’t on it. We never are. It’s said to be because of the wording of the most recent Equality 2020 Sentencing Act, which apparently forgot women exist.

Hate crimes and hate incidents

In most crimes it is something the victim has in their possession or control that motivates the offender to commit the crime. With hate crime it is ‘who’ the victim is, or ‘what’ the victim appears to be that motivates the offender to commit the crime.

A hate crime is defined as ‘Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.’

A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

But nothing to do with being a woman. Nope. Women are blissfully free of bullying, abuse, harassment, pestering, assault, rape, murder.

“Cognitive issues.”

The Republican congressmen Louis Gohmert and Paul Gosar adopted such extreme, conspiracy-tinged positions, even before the US Capitol attack, that a fellow member of the rightwing Freedom Caucus thought they “may have had serious cognitive issues”.

To be fair, lots of us think everyone in the “Freedom Caucus” has serious cognitive issues.

Denver Riggleman, once a US representative from Virginia, reports his impression of his former colleagues from Texas and Arizona in a new book.

…

Describing his own spell in Congress, between 2019 and 2021, Riggleman says he joined the hardline Freedom Caucus as a way to allay concerns among conservatives that he was insufficiently loyal to Trump.

It’s strange that loyalty to Trump would be the filter. It’s like enforcing loyalty to Bozo the Clown. You’d think they’d want an iron-jawed military type strongman, not a spongy gilded orange-tinted guy who can barely walk.

Riggleman says Gosar and Gohmert “seemed to be joined at the brain stem when it came to their eagerness to believe wild, dramatic fantasies about Democrats, the media and big tech.

“I came to believe Gosar and Gohmert may have had serious cognitive issues.”

Riggleman also calls Gosar “a blatant white supremacist”, describing him and the Iowa Republican Steve King “making a case for white supremacy over pulled pork and ribs”.

“It was unbelievable,” Riggleman writes. “I had always bristled when I’d hear Democrats dismiss Republicans as ‘racists’. To me, it seemed like an easy insult that dodged policy discussions. Now, here I was behind the curtain, seeing that some of my colleagues really seemed to hold these awful views.”

It turns out racism is real.

Sally Hines being Sally Hines.

By “extreme anti-trans activists” she means feminist women. Extreme feminist extreme women; must avoid at all costs. Abort mission.

She’s proud of her abort message.

It’s all in the wording. “Anti-trans activists” she says – but what she means is feminist women who don’t believe men are women, and don’t believe men can become women. That’s not “anti” a set of people, it’s pro-reality, pro-accuracy, pro-knowing what we mean when we say things. It’s pro-not throwing women under yet another bus.

Sussex Police are really knocking themselves out today.

Of course the “hateful” comments were not about the gender identity of Sussex Police – but leaving that clumsy mistake aside, the important thing to note is that the sex of a sexual criminal is of course highly relevant, and it’s just utterly stupid as well as evil for Sussex Police to claim it isn’t. Just imagine the scenario: man rapes a woman while she struggles and yells, he tells her he’s not a man, she says oh well that’s fine then, carry on.

A press release from Sussex Police:

Woman convicted of historic offences against children in Sussex

Seven children who were sexually abused in Sussex between 26 and 33 years ago have seen justice done after their abuser was jailed for 20 years on Thursday, September 8.

Sally Ann Dixon, 58, of Swanmore Avenue, Havant, Hants, was sentenced at Lewes Crown Court after being convicted of 30 indecent assaults against her victims.

Except, of course, that the perp is actually a man. Naturally Sussex Police doesn’t admit that until the 8th paragraph.

At the time of the offences, Dixon was John Stephen Dixon, who transitioned to female in 2004 – after the period during which the offences took place.

Not our crime.

Sussex Police is telling us we’re not allowed to point out that Dixon is a man.

It’s IRRELEVANT that the child molester who sexually assaulted at least seven children is a man??? That’s NOT RELEVANT? Women are supposed to just kick back and nod in agreement at a headline that says a woman committed those crimes?

Yes. According to them, yes.

No we’re going to express it TO YOU in reply to YOUR TWEET.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Fringe.

Many political parties seem to have over-reacted to online trans activism, imbuing social media genderist opinion with more importance and perceived support than it would actually have in the population at large. It’s as if there’s a social media equivalent to the funny-looking, strangely proportioned figures of the “motor humunculus” and “sensory humunculus” when the cerebral territories for these systems are mapped onto the surface of the brain. If the “digital humunculus” of the body politic were to be mapped out in the brains of political party officials, the acreage devoted to Twitter sensitivity would be grotesquely swollen and distorted, overshadowing the vestigial acceptance of “woke” thought amongst the vast majority of the electorate that is not consumed by or engaged in Twitter spats.

These functionaries are so eager to please the algorithmically magnified online extremists that they forget just how much of an outlier their position is out in the wild, away from the sheltered, hothouse confines of discussions limited to 280 characters at a time. They also forget that the positions they take and rules they pass in their overzealous haste to appease and empower these few vocal extremists, erode the rights and needs of women, who make up half the population. While the adults were otherwise engaged, the interns left with the keys to the social media accounts have set fire to the street, and denounced their neighbours for trying call the fire department, because their cool friends told them it was the only way to fight fascism. Unfortunately, some of the adults have decided, in the interests of fighting fascism, they want to be cool too, and think it would be best to add more fuel to the fire to keep it going, and help it spread.

Forced to make its own way in the world, the sad, malformed, misbegotten, digital humunculus (like trans activism itself) would be completely incapable of standing on its own two withered feet, let alone doing anything at all without the willing support and power given to it by those enablers and collaborators who fear (or wish to share) its frighteningly exaggerated power to avenge the slightest of slights. They haven’t realized that while transactivists don’t actually have the numbers or power to propel them into office, or drive them out, women do.

It’s Matt Walsh the Christian reactionary again, but what can I say, he’s right about the trans takeover even if it’s for the wrong reasons and he’s wrong about nearly everything else.

You can make a lot of money mutilating teenagers. Wot larks eh Pip?

It’s not ok to have conscientious objections to mutilating teenagers.

Why? Why is it ok to mutilate teenagers but not ok to refuse to do that? What caused all these people to settle on that side of the issue? Why did everyone move so fast to believe and enforce the belief that sex is all in the mind and that it’s absolutely necessary to mutilate people who say their bodies are the wrong sex? How did this happen? Why is this doctor standing behind that lectern telling her audience they will be punished if they object to mutilating teenagers? Why will there be consequences for not mutilating teenagers instead of consequences for doing so?

It’s like a damn horror movie running for years and years and years.

Updating to add:

Oh YUCK.

Play the trans buddies one. Have a sick bucket ready. Hi, we love you, we’re going to ruin your body, but we’ve got a nice BUDDY for you so you won’t ask any last minute questions.

Originally a comment by Holms on Mermonsters.

I remember visiting an acquaintance’s place years ago, a guy I thought of as decent and level-headed. Part way through the afternoon his young son arrived home from school or barged in during dinner or something, and approached his parents with the air of someone with Important News. He informed the room that he had been penalised points on a science test at school, maybe even failing it, because he answered everything in the biology section with ‘evolution isn’t real’ and ‘God created Adam and Eve’ and similar, instead of the answer he knew was expected of him.

Both parents immediately beamed at him, congratulated him for his good christian values and so on; effectively, they flooded him with approval and positivity. They then informed the rest of us that they had not coached, pressured, proselytised or anything of they sort; they insisted they had raised him with strict neutrality regarding the question of evolution versus creation.

I had known the family to be christian, but there was a distinct pang of dismay at realising they were that sort of christian. At the time, I thought the big lesson to take from this was that even generally reasonable people can have irrational – even delusional – beliefs. While this remains true, I now take a second lesson from that day. I believe those parents genuinely tried to be neutral towards their son regarding evolution, making no overt effort to pressure him into creationism; I also see that their idea of neutrality is heavily biased, undercutting their conscious effort to be neutral. The delight they showed was a strong social cue to him that choosing creationism over evolution was the one that earned parental approval, and while it was the first such instance I’d witnessed between them, it cannot have been the first time ever. The mere fact that they still claimed to be neutral with him on the matter – while love-bombing him – showed me that claims of neutral treatment of a question cannot be trusted. That may have been their genuine goal, but the selective approval shines through.

…

TRAs like to say they do not exert influence on children to be trans, that the urge bubbles up entirely from within. But they also do this:

A moderator also publicly congratulated a teenage user for deciding that they were transgender by the age of 13 and deciding that they wanted drugs and “all the surgeries”.

Positive reactions, celebratory receptions like this are a strong social cue, and children are not blind to them.

Labour not a fan of women, it seems.

“Well I am King.”

“Oh, King, eh, very nice. And how’d you get that then, eh? By exploiting the workers! By ‘anging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there’s ever going to be any progress – “

“Dennis, there’s some lovely filth down ‘ere.”

The Telegraph reports that Mermaids is giving binders to 14-year-olds against their parent’s wishes.

Mermaids, which receives funding from the taxpayer and runs training for schools and the NHS, offered to send a breast binder discreetly to a girl they believed was only 14, even after they were told that she was not allowed to use one by her mother.

Evidence obtained by The Telegraph shows that the charity’s staff have offered binders to children as young as 13 who say that their parents oppose the practice.

Chest-binding has been described by parent groups as a form of “self-harm” and it can cause breathing difficulties, chronic back pain, changes to the spine and broken ribs.

And, despite all that discomfort and risk, the girls doing it don’t magically turn into boys.

Sports risk injury too, and ballet is very hard on the feet, especially girls’ and women’s feet, but at least there’s a genuine purpose in view.

The Telegraph has uncovered evidence of the Mermaids online help centre offering advice to users who present themselves as young as 13 that controversial hormone-blocking drugs are safe and “totally reversible”.

In the last month alone, this newspaper has seen discussions in the charity’s moderated forum for 12 to 15-year-olds on how to raise money to start taking drugs and the best way to take testosterone.

A moderator also publicly congratulated a teenage user for deciding that they were transgender by the age of 13 and deciding that they wanted drugs and “all the surgeries”.

It’s so Jonestown, so Branch Davidians. Believe The Leaders, join The Cult, do what The Cult tells you to do, shun everyone outside The Cult. Believe believe believe.

In a statement setting out its position on binders, Mermaids said that it took “a harm reduction position” that providing a binder with safety instructions was better than people using other “unsafe practices” or experiencing dysphoria.

Of course Mermaids and trans activists are busy coaching people to believe that “dysphoria” is both real and worse than anything else.

Mermaids holds a privileged position in public life. The controversial charity is paid to train teachers, police forces, NHS staff and social services on dealing with transgender issues.

In recent years, it has received more than £20,000 in taxpayer’s money from grants and more than £500,000 from the National Lottery.

Staff have met government officials, given advice to the NHS and were identified as influential at the soon-to-be closed Tavistock Clinic as it was dolling out drugs to children.

It’s as if Jim Jones or David Koresh had been put in charge of Health and Human Services.

Maggie Haberman tells us what it’s like talking to Trump:

“Can you believe these are my customers?” Donald Trump once asked while surveying the crowd in the Taj Mahal casino’s poker room. “Look at those losers,” he said to his consultant Tom O’Neil, of people spending money on the floor of the Trump Plaza casino.

Which is interesting/funny/ironic because that’s what we think about him. “Can you believe this guy was president?” “Look at that corrupt ignorant greedy sack of flesh.”

I have found myself on the receiving end of the two types of behavior Donald Trump exhibits toward reporters: his relentless desire to hold the media’s gaze, and his poison-pen notes and angry statements in response to coverage. His impulse to try to sell his preferred version of himself was undeterred by the stain that January 6 left on his legacy and on the democratic foundations of the country—if anything, it grew stronger. He had an almost reflexive desire to meet with nearly every author writing a book about him.

Because he’s a massive narcissist, and too stupid to figure out how to hide it.

At one point, Trump made a candid admission that was as jarring as it was ultimately unsurprising. “The question I get asked more than any other question: ‘If you had it to do again, would you have done it?’” Trump said of running for president. “The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.” He then went on to talk about how much easier his life would have been had he not run. Yet there it was: Reflecting on the meaning of having been president of the United States, his first impulse was not to mention public service, or what he felt he’d accomplished, only that it appeared to be a vehicle for fame, and that many experiences were only worth having if someone else envied them.

As I said. Narcissist, too dumb to pretend otherwise.

They talked about Sidney Powell and how she defended herself against libel suits.

“I was very disappointed in her statement,” Trump said. “That is so demeaning for her to say about herself.” Then he essentially read stage directions on how to use public claims in lawsuits. “All she had to say,” he said, “was ‘Upon information and belief, I think such and such.’ Now all she says there, was take a thousand stories that were written over the last 10 years long before all of this, that are bad stories,” he said, “and that is information and belief, she read them. And that’s the end of that case. That’s true for everybody: ‘It’s upon information and belief and let’s go to court to find out if it’s true.’”

Funny, that’s pretty much what he said the other day about his magic power to declassify all the things. He talked absurd nonsense and then hastily inserted “as I understand it” before talking more nonsense.

Speaking to Sean Hannity of Fox News in an interview broadcast on Wednesday, the former US president said: “Different people say different things but as I understand it, if you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it.”

That’s how he understands it, ok??? You can’t punish a guy for how he understands things. Upon information and belief that’s how he understands it, amen.

I pressed him on what, at that point, was one of the persistent mysteries of January 6, which would become central to the congressional select committee’s investigation: what he had been doing in the hours when the Capitol was under assault from his supporters. He insisted that he was not watching television, despite volumes of witness testimony and other evidence to the contrary. “I didn’t usually have the television on. I’d have it on if there was something. I then later turned it on and I saw what was happening,” he said. He lied throughout that bit of our interview: “I had heard that afterward and actually on the late side. I was having meetings. I was also with Mark Meadows and others. I was not watching television.”

He always had the television on.

I was curious when Trump said he had kept in touch with other world leaders since leaving office. I asked whether that included Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and he said no. But when I mentioned North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, he responded, “Well, I don’t want to say exactly, but …” before trailing off. I learned after the interview that he had been telling people at Mar-a-Lago that he was still in contact with North Korea’s supreme leader, whose picture with Trump hung on the wall of his new office at his club.

Jeezus.

He demurred when I asked if he had taken any documents of note upon departing the White House—“nothing of great urgency, no,” he said, before mentioning the letters that Kim Jong-un had sent him, which he had showed off to so many Oval Office visitors that advisers were concerned he was being careless with sensitive material. “You were able to take those with you?” I asked. He kept talking, seeming to have registered my surprise, and said, “No, I think that’s in the archives, but … Most of it is in the archives, but the Kim Jong-un letters … We have incredible things.”

Yes because you stole them.

In fact, Trump did not return the letters—which were included in boxes he had brought to Mar-a-Lago—to the National Archives until months later. The Washington Post reported on it in early 2022; the Justice Department began investigating how the classified material made its way in and out of the White House residence. (In one of our earlier interviews, I had asked him separately about some of the texts between the FBI agent and the FBI official working on the Robert Mueller investigation whose affair prompted the agent’s removal from the case; we had learned the night before Biden’s inauguration that Trump was planning to make the texts public. He ultimately didn’t, but he told me that Meadows had the material in his possession and offered to connect me with him.)

Admits to being a blackmailer Your Honor.

I asked why he had given Jared Kushner expansive power. “I didn’t,” Trump said, although he had done exactly that. When I pressed, Trump said, “Look, my daughter has a great relationship with him and that’s very important.”

There’s that narcissism again. It may be very important to him, but to literally everyone else on the planet it’s not important at all, and his job was to work for us, not himself. Grown-ass adults with even the slightest awareness of other minds know that what’s important to Me isn’t automatically important to anyone else. Trump not so much.