Earlier today, Donald Trump blasted the way the civilian justice system treats terror suspects: “What we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughingstock.”

Three hours later, a reporter asked press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about this. Her answer: “That’s not what he said. He said the process has people calling us a joke and calling us a laughingstock.”

Trump’s comments were broadcast on national TV. They’re on tape. They’re on YouTube. But only a few hours later, the White House blandly denied he ever said it. Is there even a word for this?

Donald Trump may be furious about the Mueller investigation, but Gabe Sherman reports that Steve Bannon thinks he’s still not taking it seriously enough:

Bannon’s sense of urgency is being fueled by his belief that Trump’s hold on power is slipping. The collapse of Obamacare repeal, and the dimming chances that tax reform will pass soon—many Trump allies are deeply pessimistic about its prospects—have created the political climate for establishment Republicans to turn on Trump. Two weeks ago, according to a source, Bannon did a spitball analysis of the Cabinet to see which members would remain loyal to Trump in the event the 25th Amendment were invoked, thereby triggering a vote to remove the president from office. Bannon recently told people he’s not sure if Trump would survive such a vote. “One thing Steve wants Trump to do is take this more seriously,” the Bannon confidant told me. “Stop joking around. Stop tweeting.”

When Steve Bannon thinks you’re being too outrageous and need to rein it in, things are getting ugly. Sherman also reports that one of his sources tells him that “Dina Powell and Gary Cohn said they’re making sure to leave rooms if the subject of Russia comes up.” In other words: Please don’t subpoena me! I don’t know anything!

This is the Mott MacDonald building in London, located off Ludgate Hill near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Mott MacDonald is a “global engineering, management, and development consulting firm focused on guiding our clients through many of the planet’s most intricate challenges.” It’s one of those outfits with (allegedly) so many areas of expertise that it has to break them up into alphabetical groups on its web page. Seriously.

In any case, one of their areas of expertise is façade engineering, and this façade is indeed pretty cool.

ABC News reports that 401(k) retirement plans are on the chopping block after all:

The White House, as the president tweeted, wanted to keep the current annual maximum for tax-free contributions ($18,000); House Republicans wanted to lower the limit to $2,400. The bill, as of this morning, would lower what individuals may contribute tax-free to their 401(k)s, to an amount about halfway between the current limit and what House Republicans initially proposed.

If the new maximum is indeed halfway between, it comes to $10,200. So if you contribute, say, 5 percent of your salary, it means the cap will start to hit you at an annual salary of about $200,000 instead of $400,000.

In other words, this will make no difference to about 97 percent of us. So I guess I can’t get too worked up about it. The only thing that makes it bad is the same thing that makes the entire Republican tax bill bad: this is being done solely to pay for a tax cut that will go overwhelmingly to the very rich. In today’s GOP, even the moderately rich aren’t safe from having their taxes raised in order to pay for tax cuts to the folks making even more than them.

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Newscom via ZUMA

Just for the record, I have no problem with politicizing tragedy. There are limits, of course. Everyone should be sensitive toward the families of the victims, for example, and the general life rule of “don’t be an asshole” probably applies a little more strongly than it does all the rest of the time.

That said, pursuing a political goal when events provide a dramatic example of exactly why your political goals are important is just common sense. Think about the converse: You should only pursue your political goals when nothing much is going on and nobody really cares. That is not a recipe for getting anything done.

Jonah Goldberg, however, is on the other side:

Right now, Twitter is full of conservatives rightly mocking Schumer and other Democrats for their hypocrisy. Schumer & Co. had no problem with instantaneous demagoguery on guns and the need for gun control after the Las Vegas shooting (or countless other mass murders before that). But now that the issue is immigration, they are aghast that anyone would use a tragedy to push a policy agenda or score political points.

But what about conservatives doing exactly what we decry as well? When it’s gun control, we’re all like, “How dare you politicize a tragedy?” This was the White House’s official position in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting. “Now is not the time” etc.

Are we to think that when the blood in the street bolsters the case for even more Extreme Vetting, it’s just fine?

This is an honest question: Is there a meaningful distinction between the two scenarios? Are there some policy questions that are fair in the wake of a terror attack or mass shooting and others that must be held in check pending a respectful mourning period? Or is “propriety for thee, but not for me” the rule now?

I’m sure Tucker Carlson or someone will invent some reasons why terrorism by Muslims is totally different from terrorism by some white guy, but I think the rest of us can dismiss it in advance. The best answer, I think, is just to accept that pushing for political change in response to a tragedy is OK. You can do it well or badly, just like you can any other time, but there’s no reason not to do it.

If there’s anything that does irk me about today’s ragetweets from the White House politicizing yesterday’s terror attack, it’s the certain fact that before this morning President Trump had never heard of the Diversity Visa Lottery or cared about it.¹ But it’s nothing more than a program that ensures every region of the world has access to at least a few visas. It was created nearly three decades ago by Ted Kennedy—long before 9/11—and was passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. According to Wikipedia, “In 1990 the qualifying countries were as follows: Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Czech republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France (including Guadeloupe and New Caledonia), Germany, Great Britain and Northern Ireland (including Bermuda and Gibraltar), Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, San Marino, Sweden, Switzerland and Tunisia.”

That list of countries changed over the years to include many in the Middle East and central Asia. Four years ago Chuck Schumer tried to kill the program as part of a bipartisan immigration plan, but after passing the Senate it failed in the Republican-controlled House. So comprehensive immigration reform went down and the diversity visa program stayed around. Not that this matters since Sayfullo Saipov, who ran down and killed eight people yesterday in New York City, was admitted to the US several years before Congress began considering immigration reform.

Still, if Trump wants to use yesterday’s tragedy to push for stronger vetting of immigrants, he should go right ahead. I have no problem with this. He just needs to get his facts right.

¹FWIW, neither had I.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

Twitter is full of snark, which is the main reason I like it. Naturally, then, at first I thought this was snark. But it’s not:

President Donald Trump has told senior congressional leadership that he wants to name the forthcoming tax reform bill the “The Cut Cut Cut Act,” a senior administration official tells ABC News.

….[Paul] Ryan initially kicked the naming over to Trump because of his penchant towards branding, according to a senior Hill aide….Trump has been insistent that the bill be called “The Cut Cut Cut Act.”

I dunno. Trump is the branding genius, not me. And in the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter what the official name is. It’s going to be “the Trump tax cuts” or the CCCA no matter what Trump wants. That said, this is not the work of a man in complete control of his faculties, is it?

The key to losing weight is eating less. Exercise may be good for you, but it doesn’t really have much impact on weight. Right?

It is a question that plagues all who struggle with weight: Why do some of us manage to keep off lost pounds, while others regain them?

Now, a study of 14 participants from the “Biggest Loser” television show provides an answer: physical activity — and much more of it than public health guidelines suggest. On average, those who managed to maintain a significant weight loss had 80 minutes a day of moderate activity, like walking, or 35 minutes a day of vigorous exercise, like running.

….“The findings here are important,” said Rena Wing, a psychiatry professor at Brown University and a founder of the National Weight Control Registry, which includes more than 10,000 people. The food eaten “is the key determinant of initial weight loss. And physical activity is the key to maintenance,” she said.

Poof. Another piece of conventional wisdom about weight loss is now turned on its head. Maybe. Gotta replicate first, though. Damn scientists.

Pew Research released a survey on our growing partisan divide a few weeks ago, but I missed it while I was on vacation. Generally speaking, it says mostly what you’d expect: liberals and conservatives have both moved substantially since 2008 and are now farther apart than ever. But it’s not all bad news, and I feel like I need to put up a little ray of sunshine after my last post. So here it is. This is what happened after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson three years ago:

After Ferguson, everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, became more likely to believe that we need to do more to address racial inequities. What’s more, after a bit of a decline, it spiked back up among Republicans after a few months of Trump.

That’s good news. Far from causing a racial backlash, Ferguson helped change minds on both sides of the aisle. And it doesn’t appear that Trump did any lasting damage to the gains among Republicans. The gap between Ds and Rs is still large, but at least everyone is moving in the right direction.

This is a giant swallowtail butterfly flittering around a bush near our house on a sunny day a couple of months ago. But today you get two photos. The first is a beauty shot. The second is an action shot.

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Six weeks of semi-vacation from Donald Trump was nice, but jumping back into the cesspool is…bracing. Unlike a lot of people, though, I don’t have Trump fatigue. I’m not sure exactly what I do have, but it’s bigger than Trump. It’s more like a slow but steady rise in my unease about the future of my country. Is Trump going to turn out to be a blip, with the ship righted and returning to course in 2020? Or is Trump a harbinger of things to come?

I used to be pretty sure it was the former, but I’m less sure now. The ability of Trump to tweet out his version of alternate reality and have it accepted without question by his base is increasingly scary. It’s obvious that he doesn’t care if all the rest of us know it’s nonsense. It’s not meant for us. And no matter how crazy it gets, Fox News is willing to amplify it; congressonal Republicans are willing to ignore it; and his true-believer core laps it up. If that core is enough to power Trump to a reelection win in 2020, we’re in serious trouble even if he doesn’t start a nuclear war or destroy the rule of law.

The reason has to do with one of my other hobbyhorses: artificial intelligence. Economic anxiety among the working class was an important, but still small, part of last year’s election, but it’s likely to start growing in the mid-2020s thanks to the first glimmerings of the AI revolution. And 20th-century history is pretty clear that it’s misguided to ask whether Trump’s victory was really spurred by economic anxiety or racial anxiety. They’re a package deal. The response to widespread job losses nearly always includes a big dose of scapegoating: Jews, Ukranians, Poles, Mexicans, blacks, Catholics, you name it.

What this means is simple: If we can dump Trump in 2020 and prick the fever, we at least have a chance of dealing in a reasonable way with our forthcoming era of mass unemployment. If Trump makes it to 2024, I’d say all bets are off. A future of toxic, right-wing, nationalist-inflected populism becomes our most likely future. This means that 2018 and 2020 are, perhaps, going to be our most consequential elections since at least 1980. Maybe since 1932.

I wish I were able to be a little uplifting about all this, but I think this is just the bare truth. Progressive politics can probably survive four years of Trump. But given the march of technology, I’m not sure it will survive eight.

This was supposed to be a fundraising post, and I think something a little brighter and more hopeful was probably what our marketing folks had in mind. But that’s not really where I am these days. There’s a pretty good chance that I won’t be around by 2020, so this doesn’t affect me personally much. But it affects everyone I care about—which, believe it or not, includes everyone reading these words. You guys really, really deserve a better future than Trump can provide.

But we have to fight for it. And I hardly need to add that Mother Jones is one of the most important media outlets helping to fight for that future. If you can get into the fight personally, that’s what you should do. But if you can’t, for whatever reason, at least contribute to those who can. This is a fight that needs to be intense, relentless—and well funded.

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