We here at AP always have so much material dealing with Donald Trump requiring our comments, it’s hard to know where to begin. So we'll try to keep it concise.
As a result of what happened on November 8 last year, Americans who voted for Donald Trump made a big gamble.
Today, lawyers for New Jersey are in the Supreme Court defending Chris Christie’s laws on gambling, which are among the most permissive in the nation (https://www.npr.org/2017/12/03/567282814/new-jersey-takes-on-major-professional-sports-leagues-in-sports-betting-case).
Associate solitary reporter Susanna Sherman not only attended today’s oral argument, but she was escorted into the Justices’ conference room, where the Justices began their secret deliberations on how to rule.
“As long as there’s a Republican in the governor’s office in Trenton,” Justice Clarence Thomas began, “I would favor a ruling allowing Christie to pass even more permissive laws.”
“Clarence,” Chief Justice Roberts said, “the Garden State will have a Democrat in the guv’s office on January 16."
Hollywood Access’ Billy Bush incurred a great deal of Trump’s wrath by saying in an oped in The Times that, guess what, it really was Trump’s voice on the 2005 video in which the present occupant of the White House volubly demeaned women.
In an executive order today, Trump signed two proclamations grossly shrinking the size of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and he’s on his way to Utah to crow about it, though his real goal is to persuade Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, 83, to run for re-eelection next year so he won’t have to deal with Mitt Romney in the Senate. Both Hatch and Romney plan to urge Trump, who has no religiosity whatsoever, to become a Mormon. “You’ve already had three wives,” associate solitary reporter Jim Boy Hobarto told Trump aboard Air Force One,” so why not join the Mormons?” To which Trump replied to America’s leading Unitarian Universalist theologian, “go up front and tell my lackeys to give you a parachute -- if they feel like it."
Also today, Trump issued an executive order dismissing all FBI agents, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, his pick to succeed James Comey. This immediately followed his tweet saying that the FBI is in “Tatters.” Associate solitary reporter John Leonard is our source for this intelligence.
And Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, says Trump is entitled to obstruct justice, http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/trump-john-dowd-obstruct-justice/index.html (something he’s already done) — evidently Dowd thinks the Supreme Court will, at the stroke of a pen, overrule United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Nixon, on the scope of presidential power. ASR Sherman asked the Justices about that, and Chief Justice Roberts said, “Susanna, I’m a Republican through and through, but Trump and Dowd have another thing coming if they think we’ll overrule the Nixon case.”