We could tell:

President Donald Trump’s team rejected a course for senior White House staff, Cabinet nominees and other political appointees that would have provided training on leadership, ethics and management, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

I guess they were too busy watching Fox News and playing golf.

The documents suggest the program could have better prepared officials for working within existing laws and executive orders, and provided guidance on how to navigate Senate confirmation for nominees and political appointees, how to deal with congressional and media scrutiny, and how to work with Congress and collaborate with agencies — some of the same issues that have become major stumbling blocks in the early days of the administration.

But the contract was never awarded because after the election the transition team shifted its priorities, according to a letter the General Services Administration sent to bidders such as the Partnership for Public Service. The program was expected to cost $1 million, the documents show. The contract-based training program was authorized in 2000, and the Obama and Bush transitions both received the training.

But Trump has the most scorching case of Dunning-Kruger in the history of the world, so naturally he assumes he knows everything already. Why learn anything when you’re already the smartest and most informed guy in the world?

The Trump team has said it was determined not to spend all of its transition funds, and it returned millions to the government. To some Republicans, the program could be seen as wasteful.

Oh for christ’s sake. Penny wise pound foolish, people! Ethics training is not the place to scrimp, especially in the case of Trump & Gang.

The lack of training likely fueled a series of early missteps in the presidency, as aides fired off executive orders and new rules without briefing Congress or their peers at agencies.

“It looks like a good program, and I wish they had implemented it,” said Norm Eisen, a White House ethics lawyer in the Obama administration who now leads the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It might have spared them the numerous ethics and other messes they have encountered.”

But noooooooooooooo, because they know better than everybody.

David Remnick and Evan Osnos were on Fresh Air yesterday. I know Remnick as the editor of the New Yorker, and a frequent editorialist there; I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, that he used to be Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post. The two of them and a third author, Josh Yoffa, wrote an article about Trump, Putin and the new Cold War. It was a very meaty – informative – interview.

They wrote the article to explore why Russia messed with the election.

DAVID REMNICK: Well, I think that goes to your first question about what we found out. Well, a lot of this article is not just about the what, the what happened. It’s the why. The why goes back a – fully a generation in politics and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as a liberation, not as the oncoming of freedom of the press and assembly and religion and all these things, and – and yippee, all the republics get to go their own way. That’s not the way he experienced it at all.

This is a KGB agent who was in East Germany and experienced the end of the Soviet Union as the loss of empire, the way someone in the Ottoman Empire – a servant of the Ottoman Empire would have that kind of tragic sense of loss of empire.

Or as Churchill and others did about “losing” India…which of course wasn’t theirs to “lose,” but they didn’t see it that way, just as Putin and co didn’t see it that way.

The Russians didn’t expect Trump to win, and were overjoyed when he did, and now…they’re not so sure. (Yeah we’ve had that. The Shah? That turned out to be not such a brilliant idea. Also the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. And so on.)

Toward the end of the show they talked about Trump and the press.

GROSS: Let’s look at what’s happening to the press under President Trump. Trump tweets a lot about the press. On February 17, he tweeted (reading) the fake news media, failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN, is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people.

REMNICK: Yeah, what a phrase, the enemy of the people.

GROSS: Yeah, I know. That goes back to Stalin, right?

OSNOS: I recognize that from somewhere.

Then Remnick became impassioned:

REMNICK: Well, it goes back to Robespierre. It is an ugly, ugly phrase. I don’t know how self-aware Donald Trump is of that kind of phrase. I guarantee you Steve Bannon knows what enemy of the people means. Stalin used it to keep people terrified. If you were branded a vrag naroda, an enemy of the people, you could guarantee that very soon there would be a knock in the middle of the night at your door and your fate would be horrific.

To hear that kind of language directed at the American press is an emergency. It’s an emergency. It’s not a political tactic. And if it’s a political tactic, it’s a horrific one. And that needs to be resisted not just by people like me who are, you know, editors or writers but all of us. This is part of what distinguishes American democracy. And it’s untenable, immoral and anti-American.

Emphasis added, but it’s there in his voice, I assure you. They don’t include emphasis in the transcripts.

GROSS: So you just said that you’re not sure whether Donald Trump knows the pedigree of that expression enemy of the people, but you’re sure Steve Bannon does. So I’m wondering since this is…

REMNICK: That doesn’t excuse Trump at all.

GROSS: No, no, but I’m wondering since you’re implying here that Bannon probably knows that this is a word that was used by Stalin and that had very grave implications when it was used in the Stalinist era, what do you know about any either connections that Bannon has to Russia or about the influence of Russia on Bannon just as…

REMNICK: I know zero about that, nothing. And it’s been important for journalists to say when they don’t know things, too.

GROSS: Absolutely.

REMNICK: But I think it’s important to point out that right now you and I are having and have been having a free discussion. I’m going to go back to my office, and I will publish website and the magazine this week without any government interference. In fact, without any interference of the owners of The New Yorker. That is as close to an ideal situation as possible, and it obtains to this day. And to have people thrown out of the White House press pool for a day or even for a while does not mean the end of the press.

But it is a very ominous circumstance when the president of the United States uses this kind of language because, quite frankly, and it’s been pointed out more than once, it’s the kind of language that autocrats use in the beginning. And where it will go, we don’t know yet. But he is obviously – this is beyond dog whistles. He is signaling to the base that your enemy, your enemy is those people.

That’s how autocrats behave. They create an other. Whether it’s the press, whether it’s ethnic or otherwise, it’s the creation of an other. And I find it – I just, you know, it has to be stood up against.

Yes.

GROSS: So, David, this is a question for you. It strikes me that The New Yorker has become more overtly political in terms of the covers. The covers have become more political. A lot of the investigations are political. You wrote something that I think may be unprecedented in The New Yorker, which is after Donald Trump was elected, you wrote an editorial saying the election of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution and a triumph for the forces at home and abroad of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny and racism.

REMNICK: I wish I were wrong on every point. I hope to be wrong on every point. I mean, my hope for my country is much greater than my desire to be right in the moment. That was written on election night. And I wish that every moment in the transition, in the first month of the presidency had proved me wrong.

But it didn’t. It’s where we are. We’re in new territory, and it’s not good territory.

They want dirty water. “Restore dirty water!” they cry.

President Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday aimed at rolling back one of former President Barack Obama’s major environmental regulations to protect American waterways, but it will have almost no immediate legal effect, according to two people familiar with the White House plans.

The order will essentially give Mr. Trump a megaphone to direct his new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, to begin the complicated legal process of rewriting the sweeping 2015 rule known as Waters of the United States. But that effort could take longer than a single presidential term, legal experts said.

But at least they’re getting started on doing away with that pesky clean water that nobody wants.

Mr. Pruitt, who was confirmed by the Senate to his new position this month, is expected to enthusiastically dive in to the lengthy task of undoing major environmental rules on clean water, climate change and air pollution. In his former job as attorney general of Oklahoma, Mr. Pruitt led or took part in 14 lawsuits intended to block the E.P.A.’s major regulations, including the clean water and climate rules that he is now charged with dismantling.

Speaking over the weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Pruitt told an audience, to applause, “I think there are some regulations that in the near term need to be rolled back in a very aggressive way,” and he said those rollbacks would probably begin this week.

The clean water rule, completed by the Obama administration in spring 2015, was issued under the 1972 Clean Water Act. It gives the federal government broad authority to limit pollution in major bodies of water, like Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River and Puget Sound, as well as in streams and wetlands that drain into those larger waters.

A stirring ambition, undoing all that.

The Obama administration’s water rule, put forth jointly by the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers, was intended to clarify that authority, allowing the government to once again limit pollution in those smaller bodies of water. Environmentalists have praised the rule, calling it an important step that will lead to significantly cleaner natural bodies of water and healthier drinking water.

But it has come under fierce attack from farmers, property developers, fertilizer and pesticide makers, oil and gas producers, golf-course owners and other business interests that contend that it will stifle economic growth and intrude on property owners’ rights.

Well you can see their point. Rivers and streams are so handy for sluicing away agricultural runoff, pesticides, motor oil – you name it, rivers whisk it away.

John Cassidy at the New Yorker also somehow managed not to be so overwhelmed by Trump’s ability to read a speech aloud that he took that to be A New And Better Trump.

If there was anything fresh about what Trump said to Congress, it was largely stylistic. He didn’t pivot; he merely pirouetted, and then he dug into the same political ground he has already claimed.

About all that happened was that Trump, perhaps feeling saddled by low approval ratings, caved to the normal conventions of political communication. These rules dictate that, on august occasions such as a speech to Congress, Presidents talk politely and try to avoid giving offense. They leaven the heavy fare they are bearing with moments of optimism and humanity, promise the viewers some goodies, and offer up some notes of inclusion. Trump did all these things, and he even deployed some uplifting prose. If his Inauguration speech sounded like it had been written by Steve Bannon suffering from a migraine, Tuesday’s appeared to have been the work of a professional speechwriter.

And all that is just normal, not to say minimal. It’s not remotely a reason to decide Trump is not the malevolent bullying ignoramus he seemed on Tuesday afternoon. Trump is still that malevolent bullying ignoramus with the undisclosed tax returns.

This tone was markedly different from the one Trump had struck as recently as last week, at the cpac conference, and the television pundits swallowed it whole. In substantive terms, however, Trump didn’t give an inch, or even a millimetre. The soft opening quickly transitioned into a reiteration of Trump’s harsh “America First” agenda, and once he got there his language got considerably darker.

Take immigration, an issue to which Trump returned repeatedly on Tuesday. After pointing out that he has already ordered the rounding up and deportation of large numbers of undocumented aliens, he boasted, “Bad ones are going out as I speak.” Further promoting the myth that America is bedevilled by an immigrant crime wave, he said that he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security to set up a new office to support the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

Now why would he do that? Because it’s a chance to foment hatred against a powerless set of Others. He likes that kind of thing. What does that say about him? That he’s a terrible human being. His ability to read a speech aloud doesn’t alter that.

As Will Wilkinson, the policy analyst and blogger, pointed out during the speech, “The point of Trump’s lies is to create a widespread sense that an open, pluralistic, multicultural society is dangerous.” To justify his many illiberal proposals, as well as his authoritarian instincts, Trump needs to persuade people that everything is going to hell, and that only he can save things. Nowhere in his speech did he depart from this doleful and deceptive script.

What would Trump want with pluralism? He doesn’t admire anyone or anything except himself, so pluralism is never going to be his kind of thing.

NPR, predictably, takes the bait.

Donald Trump’s first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night was the occasion for his most presidential performance to date, balancing a reprise of his angry campaign themes with a recitation of hopes and dreams for the nation.

It was his most successful, if not his first, effort at assuming the public persona and personal demeanor associated with his new office. He stuck to the script on his teleprompter, spoke graciously to individuals in the audience and refrained from attacks on critics, rivals or adversaries.

In other words it was his least worst performance so far – but that’s a very low hurdle. He for once didn’t act like an angry toddler; big deal.

The president began with words of condemnation for the hate crimes lately unleashed on religious and ethnic minorities around the country, including the fatal shooting of an immigrant from India in a suburb of Kansas City.

“Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”

It’s good that he mentioned them, very belatedly, but again that’s a low hurdle – but even more, how dare he claim that we are “a country that stands united in condemning hate” when he spent the last two years doing everything he could to stoke and foment and inflame hate? How fucking dare he.

The president, however, did not respond to critics who say these recent acts have been encouraged by some of his own rhetoric or apparent signs of disrespect for targeted groups. Rather, he turned to strikingly poetic sentiments.

Fuck poetic sentiments. He has speechwriters; we know that. He incites hatred and he himself persecutes some of the groups he targets for hatred.

The success of the big speech strategy seemed immediately apparent. Media coverage was largely positive, even laudatory. Snap polls showed big majorities found the speech optimistic and uplifting. The president’s approval rating, which had been at historic lows for a president in his first month in office, is expected to pop back up in the next few soundings.

I hope people are not that stupid.

There was the monstrous thing Trump said to the war widow:

Carryn Owens was honored by a standing ovation by everyone visible in the vast House chamber, regardless of party or position. She wept openly, clasped her hands and looked upward as the ovation continued for several minutes. When it finally subsided, the president said, “Ryan is looking down right now and he’s happy because I think you broke a record.”

Huh. So Ryan is dead, and his widow is unhappy, but it’s cool because he’s actually just perched up there “looking down” and feeling awesome about the applause his widow got for crying because he’s dead. So he’s not dead and she has nothing to cry about so what was the standing ovation about?

Meanwhile Trump is still Trump. The fact that he can read a speech doesn’t change that.

My Freethinker column.

Barry Duke illustrated it with cartoons, including this very pointed one by Matt Bors:

Matt Bors

Meanwhile back at the ordinary everyday White House – they’re still confused (or, more likely, pretending they’re confused). They think corruption is all about intent.

President Trump’s top adviser, Kellyanne Conway, acted “without nefarious motive” when she promoted Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during an interview last month, the White House said.

CNNMoney reported Wednesday that a letter from the White House to the Office of Government Ethics said a White House lawyer met with Conway to discuss the rules regarding endorsements by government employees.

“Upon completion of our inquiry, we concluded that Ms. Conway acted inadvertently and is highly unlikely to do so again,” says the letter, signed by Stefan C. Passantino, a White House deputy counsel for compliance and ethics, according to CNN.

“It is noted that Ms. Conway made the statement in question in a light, off-hand manner while attempting to stand up for a person she believed had been unfairly treated and did so without nefarious motive or intent to benefit personally.”

The letter did not note any plans for disciplinary action against Conway.

I hear Trump did a talk last night, and did a fair job of reading the script. I hear that a surprising number of people are announcing that this means he is “presidential” and that we should “give him a chance.”

This makes no sense to me. He’s had hundreds of thousands of chances, his whole life. People give him a chance all the time. He’s had nothing but chances. He had chances after the election, and more chances after the inauguration. Why should we be giving him more of them now? It’s not as if he’s left us in any doubt about what kind of person he is. He barfs out evidence every day. Why would his ability to do something children learn to do in first grade be a reason to give him yet more chances? Especially when he already has those chances anyway – he’ll have them for four years, unless he’s impeached or otherwise expelled.

Also – that whole thing with the war widow? I haven’t watched it and hope to be able to avoid watching it forever, but anyway – how revolting can you get.

Trump was asked about that whole anti-Semitism thing today. He said it’s bad, but, BUT – watch out, because it could be people trying to make Someone look bad. (I think Someone might=Trump.) Osita Nwanevu at Slate tells the story:

On Tuesday, President Trump responded to the recent wave of anti-Semitic threats around the country in comments to a group of state attorneys general that suggested they had been orchestrated by unknown parties to make him look bad. From BuzzFeed:

“He just said, ‘Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad,’ and he used the word ‘reverse’ I would say two to three times in his comments,” [Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh] Shapiro said. “He did correctly say at the top that it was reprehensible.”

Asked for further information about the purpose of the president’s comments, Shapiro only said, “I really don’t know what he means, or why he said that,” adding that Trump said he would be speaking about the issue in his remarks on Tuesday night.

The Anti-Defamation League swiftly responded to Trump’s comment in a statement. “We are astonished by what the President reportedly said,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote. “It is incumbent upon the White House to immediately clarify these remarks. In light of the ongoing attacks on the Jewish community, it is also incumbent upon the President to lay out in his speech tonight his plans for what the federal government will do to address this rash of anti-Semitic incidents.”