A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
Backfill edition for a day when the Russia mess kept metastasizing and Trump’s first budget was already drawing fire for the kind of math that only works if you don’t look too closely.
On May 27, 2017, the Trump White House was getting hit from two directions at once: new reporting that Jared Kushner had floated a secret communications channel with Moscow, and fresh backlash to a budget blueprint that promised to slash domestic agencies while leaning on rosy assumptions and brutal cuts. The Russia story kept widening the president’s political and security problems. The budget fight showed the administration was already trying to govern by wishful thinking and pain inflicted on everyone else.
By the end of the day, the pattern was hard to miss: secrecy on the Russia front, and austerity theater on the budget front. Trumpworld kept insisting everything was normal. The evidence, as usual, was doing a much better job of talking.
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5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
Fresh reporting on May 27 said Jared Kushner had discussed a secret communications channel with the Russian ambassador during the transition, deepening the White House’s already ugly Russia problem and prompting new demands for answers from Congress.
After the Fourth Circuit upheld a block on Trump’s revised travel ban, the Justice Department doubled down on defending the order, but the ruling made clear the White House’s signature immigration policy was still in deep legal trouble.
The administration’s fiscal 2018 budget details were still rolling out on May 27, and the reaction was ferocious: deep domestic cuts, rosy assumptions, and a White House trying to sell austerity as seriousness.