In an interview with The Daily Caller posted Tuesday, the president continued to chew over an event that occurred two years ago: the release of the Access Hollywood tape where he was heard boasting, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”

Asked about rumors that “NBC leadership” deliberately leaked the tape, Trump responded:

A lot of people say that what they did — OK, so I had a lawsuit prepared, I had a lawsuit that was prepared to be filed against NBC because they leaked that tape. First of all, that was done, that tape was, there are even questions about this tape, there’s many things going on. But it was also done in a dressing room — real questions about that whole process. And they gave it to the Washington Post because they couldn’t put it out there themselves ’cause they would’ve had tremendous liability so they gave it to the Washington Post to put out. OK. I had a lawyer hired to bring a suit right after the election ended. But one problem arose — I won the election. OK, and they were going to say, ‘what was your damages?’ The damages was I lost the election, but now I won the election. So what were the damages? I won the election. I was going to sue because what they did — that was done in the dressing room. You know those trailers are really luxury, beautiful, actually. That was done in a trailer. It ruined Billy Bush’s career. And that was done in a trailer secretly. That was illegal what they did.

There’s much to say about these comments.

The president has a long history of threatening lawsuits that are never carried out. It’s by no means clear what Trump could sue for. Following his usual pattern of kettle logic, Trump is here suggesting that the tape was both faked (“there are even questions about this tape”) and a violation of his privacy (“done in a trailer secretly”). The idea that the tape is fake is an old Trump standby, one that he raised soon after it was released.

But it’s heartening to see that Trump, in the midst of it all, still has time to comment on decor (“those trailers are really luxury, beautiful, actually”).

The Senate hearings to evaluate Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court nominee are turning into a reunion of the more louche elements of the conspiratorial far right. Among those seen in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday were Laura Loomer, Chuck Johnson, and Jack Posobiec. Also present was America’s foremost purveyor of paranoid fantasies, Alex Jones, who heckled Senator Marco Rubio at a press gaggle. 

While Rubio was trying to talk about the security threat posed by China interfering in the American election, Jones stood in the sidelines and mouthed off about big tech companies “shadow banning” conservatives. “The Democrats are doing what you say China does,” Jones barked. “It’s happening here but you say I don’t exist.” 

Rubio tried to laugh it off. “I just don’t know who you are, man.” Jones mimicked, floridly but recognizably, Rubio’s braying giggle and called the senator “a little frat boy.” Rubio then asked, “Who are you?” 

After Jones tapped Rubio on the shoulder, the Republican politician said, “Don’t touch me again man. I’m asking you not to touch me.” Jones accused Rubio of “trying to get me arrested.”

Rubio replied, “You’re not going to get arrested, man.  You’re not going to get arrested. I’ll take care of it myself.” Jones then bellowed, “Oh, he’ll beat me up!”

After the gaggle ended, Jones started holding court with the remaining reporters, making homophobic insinuations about Rubio and spouting off about how he was being censored. 

Bannon, the former Trump adviser and former Breitbart chairman, has been disinvited from The New Yorker Festival, and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is apoplectic. While no fan of Bannon’s white nationalist politics, Stephens thinks the cause of public discourse would be best served by allowing the former presidential advisor to air his views and be confronted by New Yorker editor David Remnick. Stephens sees the rescinding of the invitation as a lamentable surrender by the venerable magazine to mob protest on Twitter.

Remnick, Stephens argues, “is no longer the editor of The New Yorker. Twitter is. Social media doesn’t just get a voice. Now it wields a veto. What used to be thought of as adult supervision yields—as it already has in Congress and at universities—to the itch of the crowd.”

Stephens is confusing the medium with the message. Twitter has allowed reader protests to be amplified, but the true reason that Bannon is not attending the event has nothing to to with trending hashtags and everything to do with celebrity power. Within hours of the announcement that Bannon was headlining the event, other famous guests made clear they would be dropping out: Jim Carrey, Bo Burnham, Judd Apatow, John Mulaney, and Patton Oswalt. Stephens briefly acknowledges this, but mainly to note that they “tweeted that they would pull out if Bannon remained on the program.” But the fact these big names tweeted their objection is far less important than the leverage they had as celebrities. If they didn’t show up, The New Yorker would hardly have a festival at all.

Stephens never confronts the actual objections to the invitation. He treats the planned on-stage discussion between Bannon and Remnick as a journalistic event. But The New Yorker Festival is not journalism. It’s a consumer event for well-to-do readers to meet writers and other celebrities. To invite Bannon to the event would, inevitably, grant Bannon a mainstream respectability he doesn’t deserve.

Stephens is well aware that inviting a controversial guest speaker can have the effect of legitimizing the speaker. In 2007, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger defended the school’s decision to host a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by saying that it was an excellent opportunity for the autocrat to be confronted. Objecting in The Wall Street Journal, Stephens succumbed to Godwin’s law. “Hitler at Columbia would merely have been a man at a podium, offering his ‘ideas’ on this or that, and not the master of a huge terror apparatus bearing down on you,” Stephens argued. “To suggest that such an event amounts to a confrontation, or offers a perspective on reality, is a bit like suggesting that one ‘confronts’ a wild animal by staring at it through its cage at a zoo.”

Stephens position of 2007 directly contradicts what he’s arguing now. In the more recent column he even brings up Iran again, notting that “if high-profile interviews with a racist like George Wallace or a theocrat like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were worth doing by a past generation of journalists, Remnick reasoned, why not one with Bannon?” To take it to its logical conclusion, Stephens should be willing to let Khomeini—if he were still alive—to speak at either the New Yorker festival or Columbia University.

In an upset victory, Pressley defeated fellow Democrat Mike Capuano, who has represented Massachusetts’ 7th congressional district for 10 terms. Capuano has been a progressive legislator, one who voted against the Iraq war and the Patriot Act, but Pressley outflanked him on the left by calling for the abolition of ICE, a move Capuano rejected. Capuano also supported a “Blue Lives Matter” bill that Pressley criticized.

If Pressley wins in the November general election, as she is expected to do in this heavily Democratic district encompassing half of Boston and many surrounding communities, she’ll be the first African-American woman from Massachusetts elected to serve in Congress. Her victory is further evidence that the base of the Democratic Party, especially in safe districts, want left-wing candidates. It’s also another example of the party’s increasing openness to running female and minority candidates.

The Fox News commentator drew an unusual lesson from Bob Woodward’s new book, which reportedly documents White House staff regarding President Donald Trump as an idiot whose orders often need to be countermanded. For Hume, this bolsters the case for working for Trump.

“What you see here portrayed, at least in the excerpts that we’ve seen from this book, is this volcanic president, who lies about himself in the most demeaning ways to the people around him, walks right up to the edge of what would be incredible disastrous decisions all the time ... restrained apparently only by aides around him, much of the time,” Hume noted on Fox. “There is an account in there about a document he is about to sign to do something that they came and took it off his desk. What does that say to people in the Never Trump movement, particularly on the right, who don’t think that people who are serving in the Trump administration should do so because it participates in this fiasco of a presidency? It seems to me the lesson that comes away from this is thank God for the people who are around Trump who keeping him on the straight and narrow to the extent they can because that’s a service to the country, it seems to me, without question.”

In an impressive feat of polemical jiu-jitsu, Hume is arguing that the more unfit for office Trump is, the more staffers should stick with him, in order to keep him from doing even more terrible things. In other words, the worse Trump is, the more we have to reject the counsel of the Never Trump movement.

On Tuesday, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey announced that Jon Kyl, a former senator who is currently a Washington lobbyist, will be the successor to the Senate seat held by the late John McCain. While Kyl is eminently qualified for the position, having represented Arizona in the Senate from 1995 to 2013, his selection seems connected to one key fact: he can be counted on to help confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice.

As Politico notes, “Kyl has helped direct Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, through the Senate ahead of his confirmation hearings this week.” In other words, Kyl as a lobbyist helped groom Kavanaugh for the nomination process which Kyl, soon to be a senator, will vote on. Adding to the possibility that Kyl’s sole job is to help confirm Kavanaugh is that he’s only agreed to serve until the end of the year, after which Ducey might have to find a second replacement. In other words, once Kavanaugh is confirmed, Kyl could possibly quickly return to lobbying.

Right-wing columnist Ann Coulter usefully spelled out the logic of picking Kyl in tweet she issued in late August:

The Washington Post is reporting some of the details in Fear, the forthcoming book by legendary reporter Bob Woodward. The book seems to portray a chaotic White House where senior staff goes to extraordinary lengths to undermine the policies of a president they regard as an idiot.

Among the startling revelations in the book is the claim that in April 2017, Trump ordered the assassination of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had just launched a chemical weapons attack. “Let’s fucking kill him!” the president reportedly said in a phone conversation with Defense Secretary Mattis. “Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.” Mattis told Trump that he’d work on it. Then Mattis told his own aide, “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.”

Woodward also reports that former chief economic advisor Gary Cohn was in the habit of stealing documents from the president’s desk as a way of making sure that certain policies would not be carried out:

Cohn, a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

When Trump had a letter drafted up withdrawing the United States from NAFTA, Cohn said, “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”

The willingness of Trump’s staff to subvert their commander in chief is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s obviously useful to stop Trump most dangerous impulses from being carried out. On the other hand, not obeying the lawful order of a legitimately elected official is also a subversion of democracy. Woodward refers to it as “an administrative coup d’etat.” If Woodward’s book is accurate, the United States doesn’t have a functional presidency right now.