Park Rag 3/4/2017

1 Big Thing

Good morning, Day 43 of the Trump presidency — a week from halftime of the 100 days.

I was chatting with a smart Republican about the White House’s Russia issues, and he said: “This is the rare case where the smoke IS the fire.” What he meant is that even if the White House wound up being right that there’s no “there” there (harder to see, with each day’s revelations), the warning signs and botched reactions and mounting questions have themselves become huge problems for the President.

So many of the players — by slow-rolling, obscuring or trashing the facts — have made it LOOK like they have something to hide.

The Economist, granddaddy of smart brevity, distills it brutally in “Dazed and Recused“: “Jeff Sessions met the Russian ambassador, then said he didn’t.”