By this weekend, even Fox viewers were finding out about Trump-- or at least his campaign-- conspiring to collude with the Russians. This Shep Smith segment on the video above could literally be on MSNBC or any other legitimate news outlet.By last night everyone was going crazy over Greg Miller's story in the Washington Post about how Trump had concealed details of his meetings with Putin from senior officials in administration. Is that news? We didn't know that already? Yeah, Trump went to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Putin. Oh, but this... on at least one occasion he took "possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials." I guess that's new information, albeit probably not to Mueller. That episode was "after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson. There is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader over the past two years… Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference."OK, that's kind of a big deal and maybe why right-wing journalist Stephen Hayes decided to explain to Post readers on Friday why his party needs to mount a primary challenge to Trump in 2020. Successful or not he wrote that "If ever there were a time for a serious intraparty challenge, it’s now. He has strong support from elements of the Republican base, but he has alienated virtually everyone else, especially those segments of the electorate that are growing the fastest. The ideal challenger would be a committed, articulate conservative-- maybe a governor, such as Maryland’s Larry Hogan, or a senator, such as Nebraska’s Ben Sasse-- who would make a case for limited government that will otherwise go unmade, and who would show voters that conservatism and Trumpism are not one and the same... The 2018 midterm elections were a clear and unmistakable rebuke of the chaos of his first two years as president. And it’s getting worse. Trump’s steady stream of lies has picked up over the past six months. His Twitter feed is more unhinged... There’s reason to believe this will all get worse over the next year. The Mueller investigation is testing whatever sanity Trump still possesses. Democrats controlling the House will use their newfound power to investigate every corner of the Trump administration-- an administration already marked by malfeasance and corruption."And that brings us right to Andrew Sullivan's question at New York Magazine: Welcome to Act III of the Trump Tragedy: "When is the moment we can say that Trump has clearly gone over the line in erasing democratic and constitutional restraints on his personal power?" He posits it would be declaring a national emergency just because he can't get Congress to fund his vanity wall. "He couldn’t manage to get his wall funded," wrote Sullivan, "when his own party controlled the entire government. He even turned down a bipartisan offer to build a “wall” in return for a path to citizenship for Dreamers last year, because he wanted a reduction in legal immigration as well. He petulantly refuses to accept greater funding for border control and immigration enforcement if his symbolic wall isn’t part of the package." He warned that "We all knew this was coming. Our liberal democracy is in abeyance. We now wait to see what the replacement will be. It could come sooner than we think." OK, but how many acts in this play?
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