The Daily Fuckup

Closing take

The day’s Trump-world story was less about policy than about judgment, and the judgment was dreadful. A former president who wants to be treated as the leader of a governing party had instead handed his critics a simple, devastating fact pattern: he sat down with a notorious antisemite and then spent the aftermath pretending the problem was mostly optics. That kind of screwup does not fade neatly. It lingers, because it tells people exactly what sort of chaos Trump is willing to normalize when nobody is stopping him.