Here’s How Bad The Real News Has Been For Trump In Just The Past 18 Hours

You know what the funniest thing is about America’s ongoing experiment with letting a reality TV show host/WWE half of fame inductee play President?

Well, allow us to tell you. The funniest thing about Trump’s ongoing trials and tribulations is that if you kind of step back at the end of every weekday and take stock of the news flow, what you come away realizing is that Trump suffers at least two grievous political body blows every, single day.

Rarely a day goes by when there’s not at least one story that, were this any other President, would be enough to stop the proverbial presses. And there’s more than a little irony in our using that old saying to describe the number of bombshells that hit the wires every day. If all we had to rely on was physical print media, it would be damn near impossible to produce a daily edition that was any semblance of current because there’s a new front-page-worthy story about this administration every couple of hours.

Fox and the alt-Right echo chamber do their best when it comes to creating smoke screens by manufacturing “news” about uranium conspiracies and secret FBI plots and deep state meddling, but that’s largely an exercise in futility. And not necessarily because all of those stories are completely “fake” (I mean obviously most of them are indeed fake, but if you’re really trying, you can find little kernels of truth in almost anything), but rather because the tidal wave of actual, real news is so overwhelming that spinning this presidency as anything other than a real-time train wreck is well nigh impossible.

Over the last 24 hours, there’s been no shortage of celebratory coverage from the Right regarding Democrats’ purported “cave” on DACA. We were hardly “biased” in our take. Go and find me an alt-Right website that described the situation in harsher terms than we did when we said the following Monday afternoon:

Boy, the GOP really grabbed themselves a big ol’ handful of Democrat pussy on Monday.

So no, we didn’t sugarcoat a damn thing. That is the very opposite of sugarcoating.

There is indeed a sense in which that represented a “win” for Trump on immigration but make no mistake, the rest of the news flow yesterday was nothing short of a nightmare.

On Monday evening for instance, Axios reported that Jeff Sessions, folding under Twitter pressure from Trump, tried to make FBI Director Christopher Wray fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe only to have Wray threaten to resign if McCabe was removed.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s a goddamn disaster of a revelation because it once again underscores the notion that Trump is trying to strong-arm the FBI and if true, it suggests he’s literally trying to commandeer the agency that’s investigating him. “Trump started his presidency by pressuring one FBI Director (before canning him), and then began pressuring another (this time wanting his deputy canned),” Axios wrote, before adding the obvious: “This much meddling with the FBI for this long is not normal.”

No, it is not normal.

Then, just hours later (i.e. this morning) The New York Times reported that Sessions was questioned for “several hours” by Robert Mueller last week. “The meeting marked the first time that investigators for the special counsel are known to have interviewed a member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet,” the Times said, for emphasis.

Clearly that’s bad news because Sessions could potentially be implicated both on the collusion front (for obvious reasons) and in the obstruction of justice probe for his role in firing James Comey. Further, Sessions has come under tremendous pressure from Trump at various times over the last several months for all manner of things including not being aggressive enough in investigating Trump’s political adversaries which, of course, include the FBI.

Then, just hours after that, Politico reported that Chuck Schumer has now taken funding for Trump’s border wall off the table after originally showing a willingness to include $1.6 billion in funds for the project in one of the deals that was put forth prior to the shutdown. Schumer “took it off,” Dick Durbin (who heard “shithole“) said. “He called the White House yesterday and said it’s over.”

Every one of those stories is disastrous for Trump. The first one suggests he’s still actively obstructing justice, the second one suggests one of the people involved in that ongoing obstruction is now a person of interest in a probe by the people who are the target of the obstruction, and the third one seems to portend another government shutdown, this time closer to the debt limit.

Again, these are all stories that have hit in the past 18 hours. It’s almost unfathomable that things continue to unravel at this pace.

So while your favorite batshit crazy Right-wing radio hosts chase after secret FBI plots and deep state conspiracies and while Fox celebrates Trump’s big “shutdown win” (itself an oxymoron), all of the shit described above paints a picture of complete chaos.

Think about that and then remind yourself that that’s just one day’s worth of news.