And the Obama administration agrees, announcing that it will end the federal use of private prisons, a major new policy that has been sought by criminal justice reformers.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on Thursday instructed officials that when existing contracts come up for renewal, they are to either decline to do so or “substantially reduce” their scope. The relevant contracts will all come up for renewal over the next five years.

“The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services,” Yates told The Washington Post, “and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that.”

In addition to an Inspector General’s report finding serious problems with safety and security for both inmates and staff in private prisons, there was also the recent, brutal exposé by Mother Jones’s Shane Bauer, who went undercover as a staffer at a private prison housing state inmates in Louisiana. In that piece, Bauer detailed chilling accounts of inferior medical care—including an inmate who lost both his legs and his fingers to untreated gangrene—sexual assaults, and other abusive practices, as well as the frequent cancellation of such rehabilitative services as the law library, education and job training, and drug counseling.

One thing to bear in mind, though, is this does not by itself signal the end of private prisons. According to Bauer’s statistics, most of the private prison population comes from state judicial systems, not the federal system.

The biggest story coming out of Rio is the controversy over whether the silver-haired dude-bro did or did not get mugged by cops outside of the Olympic Village. For those who haven’t been following, the facts in this case are weird and shifting, the upshot being that Lochte, the U.S. gold medalist swimmer, may have filed a false police report when he claimed that he and three other American swimmers were held up at gunpoint by men pretending to be police last weekend. The whole truth of the matter has yet to emerge, but new evidence suggests Lochte and company were the ones causing trouble that night, allegedly trashing a bathroom door at a gas station. Now his American teammates are saying Lochte fabricated the story, according to ESPN.

Rio is a city with real problems of crime and violence, among them the wanton brutality of its police. Its residents resent the billions spent on superficial makeovers for the Olympics instead of much-needed services and infrastructure, a story that has struggled to grab the attention of American audiences the way Lochte’s initial claim has. Residents also resent the condescending racism that made Lochte’s initial version of events so easy for foreigners to accept, which is one of the reasons the Brazilian authorities are taking the Lochte case so seriously. If it turns out that Lochte is indeed just a drunk gringo using Third World stereotypes to cover up his transgressions, it will say nothing good about Lochte or the way these Games have been covered.

The Wall Street Journal has unearthed 2013 footage of Donald Trump’s new white-nationalist-baiting campaign chair, Breitbart head honcho Steve Bannon, complaining, “We don’t really believe there is a functional conservative party in this country, and we certainly don’t think the Republican Party is that.”

On the one hand, the fact that the Republican Party isn’t a functional conservative party was trivially true at the time, and has only become more blindingly so in the years since. But by effectively capturing the GOP, Bannon has fulfilled his own prophecy. There’s an old aphorism in U.S. politics that Republicans insist government doesn’t work, then get elected and prove it. Bannon is—perhaps unwittingly or subconsciously, but possibly with complete awareness and malign intent—running the same play, against the GOP instead of the government. This election looks more and more like divine retribution for decades of conservative bad faith.

If Romney’s campaign concocted its own polling to convince itself it was winning in 2012, then Team Trump is retreating into another universe altogether, another sign that his campaign represents the triumph of the right-wing echo chamber.

Yesterday, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen appeared on CNN to deny that there had been any campaign shakeup. He then pushed back against host Brianna Keilar’s statement that Trump was currently down against Hillary Clinton: “Says who?” 

“Polls,” Keilar responded. “Most of them. All of them?” 

After an uncomfortable pause, Cohen reiterated: “Says who?” 

“Polls. I just told you. I answered your question.” 

“Which polls?” 

“All of them.”  

On CNN this morning, new campaign adviser Kellyanne Conway was asked about the offensive headlines at Breitbart, whose chief, Stephen Bannon, is now leading Trump’s campaign. These include: “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews”; “Sympathy for the Devils: The Plot Against Roger Ailes—and America”; “Big Trans Hate Machine Targets Pitching Great Curt Schilling”; and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

Conway didn’t seem to see anything wrong with them: “I’ve not read those stories, but I have to say—not unlike the reason that most of the media cover Donald Trump, and not Hillary Clinton—people like to click on headlines and see what they’re about.”

It appears that Bannon and Conway were brought in so that Trump wouldn’t be surrounded by advisers telling him to change. The only way they could think this is a good idea is if they are living in a separate world from the rest of us.

The Republican candidate for president tweeted out this rather strange message Thursday morning:

At first glance, the tweet seems nonsensical. The United States, of course, is not Britain. It is not even in the European Union. And Trump had no actual involvement in the Brexit referendum, beyond his praising of the result while touring his golf course in Scotland. (Scotland voted heavily to Remain in the EU.)

But, a day after he brought on a leader of the alt-right media to head his campaign, he appears to be associating his campaign with the right-wing movements that have sprung up across Europe, including UKIP in Britain. It is of a piece with his attempt to link Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who has become an enemy of the right for opening Europe’s borders to refugees. He is fully embracing his identity as a force of white nationalism and a disruptor of allegedly corrupt Western institutions.

Sadly, this is how the Republican leadership is justifying uniting behind an unstable candidate who has shifted the party away from laissez-faire capitalism to a right-wing nationalistic populism. Here’s how RNC communications director Sean Spicer spun it for The Washington Post:

For almost three years, he was one of the town’s most ardent advocates for free trade. Today, he is fighting for Trump, the most protectionist GOP nominee in decades. He acknowledges the contradiction, but Spicer’s tradecraft places a greater value on loyalty than consistency. “There are doctors who help people who have done bad things, there are lawyers who defend bad people,” he said. “I don’t think it’s unique to my profession.”

While it is true that a doctor will treat a criminal and a lawyer will defend him, shouldn’t politics be different? O.J. Simpson’s lawyers might’ve successfully flim-flammed a jury, but they weren’t trying to make The Juice the leader of the free world and put his finger on the nuclear button.

For what it’s worth, the phoniness of the political class is precisely what Trump ran against. As Spicer shows, for many operatives politics is simply about winning, divorced from ideas or the public consequences of people’s actions.

Not only was Manafort effectively dumped as Trump’s campaign manager (he still technically holds the title of campaign chairman), but two separate new articles have added more insight into Manafort’s shady ties to Russian interests. All of this comes on top of Sunday’s story that Manafort was allegedly slated for undisclosed cash payments of $12.7 million from Ukraine’s defunct Party of Regions, the pro-Russian party of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The Associated Press reports that during Manafort’s work for Yanukovych, he and his business associate Rick Gates conspired to funnel money from Ukraine to U.S. lobbyists through a nonprofit organization linked to Party of Regions. They allegedly did so in a way that would evade the stringent reporting requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The money totaled $2.2 million, and was split roughly evenly between Democratic firm the Podesta Group—headed up by Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary Clinton adviser John Podesta—and Republican firm Mercury LLC, headed by former congressman Vin Weber. Among the nonprofit’s lobbying activities was an attempt to stop U.S. pressure on Ukraine to release Yanukovych’s then-imprisoned political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko.

The Times of London, meanwhile, reports that Ukrainian authorities now say Manafort was directly involved in the disruption of NATO exercises in Crimea. The region was later annexed by Russia.

Even if Trump didn’t decide to go the full Trump, today might have been the day Manafort fell from grace.

The last big shake-up involved getting rid of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a loose cannon. The new shake-up represents a return to the good old days of Lewandowski, even if he himself isn’t returning to the campaign. As Chuck Todd and Mark Murray of NBC report:

It’s a return to Lewandowski without Lewandowski: As NBC’s Ali Vitali writes, Manafort’s earlier ascension was an effort to professionalize the campaign. “The expectation around Manafort’s installation was for a more traditional campaign in terms of structure, strategy and messaging.” But the Bannon-Conway moves represent a kind of return to Lewandowski—without him back. “Trump’s turn away from Manafort is in part a reversion to how he ran his campaign in the primary with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski’s mantra was ‘let Trump be Trump’ and Trump wants to get back to that type of campaign culture,” The Washington Post says.

The whole farce shows how ridiculous it ever was to hope—as the RNC and some pundits did—that Trump could mature and pivot to the center. The Lewandowski slogan of “let Trump be Trump” worked because Trump is incapable of being anything other than Trump. Trump is a very fixed character, with little flexibility. Under the stress of a national campaign, his instincts are to double down and become more and more Trump-like. The dream of a pivot to the center deserves what it is getting: an ignominious death.