Today Melania Trump told people not to be abusive on social media.

Melania Trump warned that social media can be used in a “destructive and harmful” manner during remarks Monday at a conference on preventing cyberbullying. On the morning that she attended the event in Rockville, Md., her husband ripped into his adversaries on Twitter.

“In today’s global society, social media is an inevitable part of our children’s daily lives,” the first lady said. “It can be used in many positive ways but can also be destructive and harmful when used incorrectly.”

…

After the first lady spoke, she listened to a panel titled “Perspectives From Social Media Industry: Existing Efforts to Support Youth.” One of the speakers was

Steve Benen at Maddow Blog gives some details on why it’s so absurd for Trump to scream about “McCarthyism.”

First, Trump might want to read his first book. In “The Art of the Deal,” his ghostwriter wrote, “Tough as he was, Roy Cohn had a lot of friends, and I’m not embarrassed to say I was one. He was a truly loyal guy.”

In a more recent interview with the Washington Post, Trump said of Cohn, “Some people didn’t like him, and some people were offended by him. I mean, they would literally leave a dinner. I had one evening where three or four people got up from a table and left the table because they couldn’t stand the

A new book says Trump may be a Russian asset compromised by billions of laundered dollars in shady real estate deals.

In House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, veteran journalist and author Craig Unger names 59 Russians as business associates of Trump (who has claimed he has none) and follows the purported financial links between them and the Trump Organization going back decades.

Newsweek asked Unger some questions.

You call this the greatest intelligence operation of our time. What do you mean by that?
It started out as a simple money-laundering operation at Trump Tower in 1984, when a Russian mobster came to Trump Tower with $6 million in cash

Oopsie. Trump’s lawyers don’t know exactly what McGahn told the Mueller team.

The president’s lawyers said on Sunday that they were confident that Mr. McGahn had said nothing injurious to the president during the 30 hours of interviews. But Mr. McGahn’s lawyer has offered only a limited accounting of what Mr. McGahn told the investigators, according to two people close to the president.

That has prompted concern among Mr. Trump’s advisers that Mr. McGahn’s statements could help serve as a key component for a damning report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which the Justice Department could send to Congress, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

But that’s ok, because Trump is telling us on … Read the rest

The Times ran a much discussed piece yesterday about a White House lawyer telling the Mueller inquiry the truth.

The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter.

…

Among them were Mr. Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and Mr. Trump’s obsession with putting a loyalist in charge of the inquiry, including his repeated urging of Attorney General

You might think Republicans would want to distance themselves from Trump’s racist outbursts, but no, they’re cool with all that.

The president of the United States had just lobbed another racially charged insult — this time calling his former top African American adviser a “dog” — but Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) had no interest in talking about it.

“I’ve got more important things on my mind, so I really don’t have a comment on that,” said the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, chuckling at the question.

Oh, more important things – so the president spewing racist insults on Twitter isn’t important. Well it’s not important to this one white guy at least.

Has President Trump ever said anything on race that

Tim Weiner, a former NY Times reporter and author of a history of the CIA and one of the FBI, reminds us (and Trump) that Trump is not a king.

(It’s true that literally speaking he’s not, but we’re learning every day that he has royal and more than royal powers. He’s doing shit that constitutional monarchs in Europe wouldn’t dare do, and we can’t stop him.)

In times of crisis, the leaders of the military and intelligence communities try to put aside their differences, often many and sundry, and work together for the good of the country. That’s what’s happening today with a remarkable group of retired generals, admirals and spymasters who have signed up for the resistance,

There’s another letter, this one from 6o former CIA officers saying Sir this is bullshit Sir.

Breaking: In new letter, 60 Fmr CIA officers protest Trump on clearances: “We believe equally strongly that former govt officials have the right to express their unclassified views on what they see as critical national security issues without fear of being punished for doing so” pic.twitter.com/D5UxhjrG3n

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) August 17, 2018

In a nutshell, it says they believe former government officials have the right to express their unclassified views on what they see as critical national security issues without fear of being punished for doing so.

Sad that a president needs that explained to him. Even sadder that he’ll pay no attention … Read the rest

A clusterfuck we didn’t hear about at the time:

Early on in the Donald Trump administration, the president vested many of his nearest and dearest with tasks they were woefully unprepared for—and Apprentice superstar Omarosa Manigault-Newman was no exception.

Long before she was his chief antagonist, Manigault-Newman was tapped by President Trump to handle veterans’ issues for the White House—causing immediate backlash from vets organizations who read this as a slap in the face and a betrayal of his campaign rhetoric about “taking care of our veterans.”

What, just because she had no relevant experience or expertise and was appointed as an act of grotesque frivolity by her reality TV buddy? Picky picky picky.

So they all had a meeting … Read the rest

Fred Kaplan at Slate says yesterday’s op-ed by retired admiral William McRaven is a big deal.

One former senior intelligence official who read the op-ed sent me an email: “Takes my breath away. This is BIG!!!” Another wrote, again on background, that fellow officers—retired and active-duty—will take this as a sign of a major rupture in civil-military relations, brought on by Trump’s blatant disrespect for national security officials and the entire security system.

Which has to be alarming for people in the military. The guy at the top who can unilaterally make things happen is a flaming lunatic and egomaniac – yes that’s pretty scary.

Then, late on Thursday night, 12 former CIA directors and deputy directors released a similar

Trump has canceled his fascist parade and blamed the DC government for making it too expensive.

President Trump on Friday canceled plans for a military parade this fall in Washington, blaming local officials for inflating the costs and saying they “know a windfall when they see it.”

Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, pushed back on Twitter, saying that she had “finally got thru” to the president to convey the “realities” of what it costs to stage events like military parades in the city.

She put the number at $21.6 million, though the city’s costs are just a fraction of the total, with federal agencies also kicking in millions of dollars. A day earlier, the Pentagon said Mr. Trump’s parade to celebrate

David Ignatius asks:

What was so threatening about the former CIA chief? Beyond Brennan’s sheer cussedness, I’d guess that Trump was frightened — and remains so to this day — about just how much Brennan knows about his secrets. And by that, I don’t just mean his dealings with Russian oligarchs and presidents but the way he moved through a world of fixers, flatterers and money launderers.

Hmm, yes, Brennan probably does know a lot about Trump’s secrets. So…it wasn’t particularly clever to piss him off further, was it.

Brennan, like Comey, was there at the beginning of this investigation. Trump must have asked himself: What does Brennan know? What did he learn from the CIA’s deep assets in

The retired admiral who oversaw the raid that killed bin Laden tells Trump to take away his security clearance too.

Dear Mr. President:

Former CIA director John Brennan, whose security clearance you revoked on Wednesday, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. Few Americans have done more to protect this country than John. He is a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question, except by those who don’t know him.

Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.

He says he … Read the rest

Trump has always called women dogs, so lighten up already. Gail Collins is one of those women:

Hey, it was long ago, but it still comes up. Particularly now that we’re making lists of all the women our president has ever compared to a canine. Back when I worked for New York Newsday, he sent me a copy of a column I’d written, scrawled with objections, along with an announcement that I was “a dog and a liar” and that my picture was “the face of a pig.” At the time, he was only a flailing real estate developer trying to make a deal with the city, yet it still seemed so weird that at first I wondered if

Trump is triggered. His people have been telling him to ignore Omarosa and her book, which tells us that they’ve confused him with someone else.

Now advisers fear his rage at Manigault Newman is fueling irrational outbursts that bolster the claim in her book that Trump said the “n-word” during an Apprenticeouttake.

Irrational outbursts? Trump?? Surely not. It’s people like Brennan and Comey who go in for that kind of thing; Trump says so himself.

In recent days, Trump has called Manigault Newman “crazed,” a “lowlife,” and a “dog” on Twitter. His campaign filed an arbitration suit against her seeking “millions.” And Trump told advisers that he wants Attorney General Jeff Sessions to have Manigault

Vox gives us Sarah Sanders’s disgusting performance “explaining” Trump’s attack on Brennan.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, reading a statement from the president during the daily press briefing on Wednesday, cited Trump’s “constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information” as justification for his decision to revoke Brennan’s clearance.

“Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations — wild outbursts on the internet and television — about this administration,” Sanders said, reading the president’s statement.

“I’m not a reckless lunatic, you’re a reckless lunatic!” Trump is the guy who goes in for wild outbursts on Twitter and at … Read the rest

Trump has been on a Twitter binge. (Does he ever do any actual work?) One in particular got my attention.

“The action (the Strzok firing) was a decisive step in the right direction in correcting the wrongs committed by what has been described as Comey’s skinny inner circle.” Chris Swecker, former FBI Assistant Director.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 15, 2018

What what what? That sounds as if the FBI has been doing Trump’s bidding. Who is this Swecker and where did Don get that weird assertion? So I googled Swecker’s name and got a Think Progress piece from a couple of hours ago:

As he’s in the habit of doing, on Wednesday morning President Trump tweeted out