Trump may have been dreading his trip to the Middle East, but it could have acted as a kind of palate cleanser. After all, Nixon and Clinton both found comfort in overseas trips during political crises. At the very least, the trip would force other issues—Trump’s foreign policy and his reception in the Arab world—to the forefront.

Trump has only been gone for a couple of hours, but there is no sign that the flood of leaks from the White House will stop now that he’s gone. Within minutes of each other, two major scoops dropped. The New York Times reported that Trump bragged to two Russian officials about firing “nut job” James Comey. He allegedly told them, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Then The Washington Post reported that the FBI investigation into Russia’s interference in the election “has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest.” That is very vague—and “person of interest” doesn’t mean a whole lot—but this person nevertheless sounds like a very senior person. “The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president,” according to the Post. (Is it Jared?)

It’s a fitting end to what has been a completely insane week. Over the last five days we’ve learned that Trump revealed highly classified information to Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak; that James Comey kept records of his meetings with the president showing that Trump tried to interfere with the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn; that the White House knew Flynn was under FBI investigation when he was brought on as national security advisor; and that Robert Mueller had been appointed as special counsel in the Department of Justice’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The two latest stories offer two key lessons. The first is that Trump has truly terrible instincts and little impulse control. Speaking in this fashion to the Russians, one of whom is a well-known spymaster, is incredibly stupid and short-sighted. The second is that Trump is screwed. The slow drip of Russia news has become a torrent. The investigation into Russian interference keeps getting closer to Trump and Trump keeps doing himself no favors.

Somewhere, Mike Pence is smiling.

Though regularly drowned out by the clanging of major developments—I mean, holy crap!—one of the biggest guessing games in Washington right now revolves around Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and his role in James Comey’s firing. Specifically: What the hell was he thinking?

I was struck by this exchange between reporters and Congressman Jim Himes, who sat in on a briefing Rosenstein provided to the full House of Representatives today. Himes, according to The Washington Post, “recalled the ‘dissonant moment’ when Rosenstein refused to say ‘who had asked him, if anyone had asked him to write his memorandum.’”

“He said, ‘That is [Special Counsel] Bob Mueller’s purview,’ and that was puzzling to a lot of us,” said Himes, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

It strikes me as fairly revelatory that the question of who was involved in laying the pretext for firing Comey is now a matter for the special counsel to examine.

Rosenstein’s representations here read like a tacit admission that, in the wind-up to the firing, he may have been witness to a crime—the obstruction of justice, perhaps.

And if Rosenstein thinks that’s possible, it’s worth considering both the text of the memo itself, his selection of a Comey ally as a special counsel, and everything he’s told members of Congress in a new context. Remember, Rosenstein has told Congress that Trump made it clear he intended to fire Comey before Rosenstein wrote the memo, and that the memo was “not a statement of reasons to justify a for-cause termination.” Rosenstein is acting like a law enforcer confronted with a subject—who just happens to be his boss—trying to inculpate him in wrongdoing.

The creative minds at Disney have a problem. Normally the current occupant of the White House gets a robot counterpart, which is given a speaking part in the animatronic show at the Hall of Presidents. But the current president is so polarizing that Disney is worried he’ll ruin the show. According to reporting from Motherboard, the solution is to have a mechanical Trump but keep his speaking parts to a minimum:

Motherboard spoke via email and phone to a source close to Walt Disney Imagineering—the research and development department behind Disney’s theme park attractions. And according to the source, Donald Trump will be in the attraction, but he will probably not have a speaking role, unlike the three presidents immediately before him. The Imagineers will likely revert the attraction to its pre-1993 format, where only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln recited lines, while keeping the more realistic, grounded tone of the current show.

This might be a good business solution but it would be much more entertaining if Disney had made the animatronic Trump imitate the real one as closely as possible. Imagine a mechanical president telling visitors about his amazing Electoral College victory, the perifidy of Crooked Hillary, the dangers of Mexican rapists, and how he’ll build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. If the show were restricted to adults, animatronic Trump could even talk about grabbing women by their genitals.

With each day’s political news triggering an avalanche of Russia-tinged scandal on the White House, it may seem like nothing’s getting done in the actual world of policy. But that’s not true, especially when it comes to the environment. On Thursday, the Trump administration quietly announced it was rolling back yet another Obama-era environmental regulation—this time, one that forced state and local officials to measure greenhouse gas emissions from cars driving on federally funded highways. According to The Hill, the Obama administration wanted the government to “find out if federal dollars are going to environmentally sound causes.” That regulation will now be delayed by a year while the administration figures out whether it wants to keep it. (Spoiler alert: They will not want to keep it).

It’s a relatively small action on a relatively small regulation, but it’s just the latest example of a slow but sure dismantling of Obama’s environmental legacy. Since January, Trump has ordered reviews or delays of all of these things:

• Obama’s ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in parts of the Arctic, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans. 
  
• Obama’s establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, as well as 40 other national monuments created since 1996.
• Obama’s protections on 6.5 acres of remote Alaskan lands. 
• Obama’s regulations on ground-level ozone, an air pollutant.
  
• Obama’s fuel efficiency requirements for cars. 
• Obama’s rule limiting toxic wastewater dumping from coal plants.

And Trump has ordered repeals of all of these things: 

• Obama’s signature package of rules to fight climate change, the Clean Power Plan.
• Obama’s sweeping clean water regulation, the Waters of the United States rule. 
• Obama’s proposed ban on chlopyrifos, a pesticide that many scientists say is harmful to human health. 
• Obama’s decision rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline. 
• Obama’s requirement that oil and gas companies report their methane emissions.
• Obama’s ban on new coal leases on public lands.  
  

This list is not comprehensive, and not all of these things are as consequential as they sound. Trump may have ordered a repeal of the Clean Power Plan and WOTUS, for example, but they are not repealed yet, and will likely take years to do so—if they can be repealed at all. Legal challenges are expected to be filed against a number of these actions as well, meaning some may not come to pass. 

But the Keystone XL pipeline is already effectively approved; oil and gas companies already don’t have to comply with emissions reporting requirements; and chlopyrifos can now be widely used on farms across America. It’s worth remembering that while Trump has been unable to make progress on ridding himself of scandal, his progress on dismantling Obama’s environmental legacy is just getting started. 

The disgraced former Fox News host has published a fond remembrance of his disgraced former boss, calling the network’s founder, who died Thursday at 77, a “force of nature,” “a man on a mission,” and “an unforgettable person”—all objectively true statements, though not always in flattering ways. But O’Reilly, who like Ailes left Fox over allegations of serial sexual harassment in the workplace, cast one of the most powerful players in modern American politics as the victim of his haters:

Roger Ailes experienced that hatred and it killed him. That is the truth. But he would not want to be remembered that way. He did both good and bad in his life and in that, he has something in common with every human being.

O’Reilly described Ailes’s quest “to infuse America with traditional philosophy” and called him “genuine, charismatic, profane, generous and sincere in his beliefs.” He claimed the vast majority of Fox employees lamented Ailes’s departure: “If a Fox person had trouble, Roger was the guy to go to.”

This is a brazen whitewashing of Ailes, who pioneered racist, fear-mongering campaign messaging, created the TV network almost singularly responsible for perpetuating the most pernicious elements of conservative politics, and created a toxic workplace for women at Fox. His New York Times obituary describes “a cascade of allegations from women, who reported unwanted groping and demands for sex by him. Some of them described an overall culture of misogyny at Fox News.” Ailes didn’t solve trouble for his female employees; he created it.

O’Reilly’s remembrance is a fitting coda to the Ailes saga: his most famous TV personality, who has long practiced the politics of grievance for powerful white men, griping in defense of the one to whom he owes everything.

Three months ago, when Michael Flynn resigned as national security advisor after it became clear that he had lied to the vice president and others about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, sources close to Pence went to work. NBC News reported that Pence, who was in charge of Donald Trump’s presidential transition, had been kept in the dark about Flynn’s activities and was not aware of them until shortly before they became public. This, despite the fact that acting Attorney General Sally Yates had warned the administration about Flynn’s duplicitousness weeks before.

This was a strange denial. It meant that Pence either incompetently led the transition or that the White House had created a communications loop that left out the vice president, the third- or fourth-most powerful man in Washington (depending on Trump’s feelings on any given day about Steve Bannon). There’s no doubt that incompetence has emerged as the best, most believable excuse of the Trump administration. But it didn’t really add up, suggesting that Pence was scheming.

The administration is in free fall once more and Pence is at it again. On Thursday evening NBC News reported that Pence has been kept in the dark about “any investigation relating to Flynn’s work as a foreign agent for Turkey,” according to a source close to the administration. The source cited a “pattern” of not informing the vice president, calling it “malpractice or intentional, and either are unacceptable.”

But we know that the Trump transition team was made aware, well before the inauguration, that the FBI was investigating Flynn over the Turkey issue. And again, Pence led the transition. Denying that Pence knew about Flynn’s lobbying work for Turkey is stranger still given that Rep. Elijah Cummings sent a letter to the transition about exactly this topic. (NBC News’s source said, “I’m not sure we saw the letter.”)

“President Pence” has superseded “President Bannon” and “President Kushner” in recent days, as Republicans pine for a “normal” presidency. But the case Pence is trying to make—that he shouldn’t be blamed for Flynn in the slightest—is not very strong. The point is to present Pence, once again, as a force of stability in a very unstable administration—and to protect Pence from the taint of this administration if things get really bad.

Among the many revelations in this morning’s cascade of insanely damaging news reports (not to be confused with last night’s cascade of insanely damaging news reports, or the cascade of insanely damaging news reports that awaits us tonight) is the existence of a back-channel between President Donald Trump and his axed national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Late last month, fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — under investigation by federal prosecutors, with his lawyer seeking immunity for him to testify to Congress — met with a small group of loyalists at a restaurant in the northern Virginia suburbs.

Saddled with steep legal bills, Flynn wanted to reconnect with old friends and talk about potential future business opportunities. But one overriding question among those present were his views on the president who had fired him from his national security advisor post.

Flynn left little doubt about the answer.  Not only did he remain loyal to President Trump; he indicated that he and the president were still in communication. “I just got a message from the president to stay strong,” Flynn said after the meal was over, according to two sources who are close to Flynn and are familiar with the conversation, which took place on April 25.

It’s unclear whether this was the extent of their communications, and thus too early to tell whether Trump is creating legal jeopardy for himself—though as the Daily Beast reported eight days and several lifetimes ago, “White House lawyers have had to warn President Donald Trump repeatedly against reaching out to his fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.”

But to flesh out a historical analogy taken at random, on absolutely nobody’s mind, we can say that what Trump told Flynn is more or less exactly what Richard Nixon told his ousted chief of staff and Watergate conspirator H.R. Haldeman near the end of the line. 

After Nixon reluctantly fired Haldeman, the two spoke by phone. There is, of course, a recording. “Keep the faith. Keep the faith,” Nixon said. “You’re going to win this sonofabitch.” Haldeman spent 18 months in prison. 

Over the last two years, there has been a near-constant watch for the thing that will finally doom Trump. Sexual assault allegations, mob ties, racial housing discrimination, the birther crap, “Mexicans are rapists,” “John McCain isn’t a war hero,” Trump University, the Trump Foundation charity scam, “blood coming out of her wherever,” the Muslim ban, “Miss Piggy,” the Access Hollywood tape, and, perhaps most important of all, his campaign’s extensive and highly questionable ties to Russia—all have been floated, at one time or another, as being potential causes of Trump’s undoing. And yet, with the exception of Russia, which continues to undermine his presidency, Trump has weathered every storm. The same 24-hour news cycle that makes these scandals quickly moves on and Trump, though more battered than before, does as well.

The firing of James Comey, though, might be different. The appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel means that the Comey scandal will persist, likely for the rest of Trump’s first term. Given the shady dealings of Trump, his family members, and their associates over the years, it’s likely that Mueller’s investigation will uncover some damaging details, even if it does not ultimately show collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Comey’s firing has unleashed a non-stop amount of blowback. Just this week, we learned that Trump discussed highly classified information with two Russian officials, jeopardizing America’s relationship with Israel and other allies. We learned that Comey kept records of his meetings with Trump, which appear to show the president trying to influence the FBI investigation into Michael Flynn. A few minutes before Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein announced that Mueller would be appointed special counsel, The Washington Post reported that during the 2016 election House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had joked that Vladimir Putin pays Trump.

And after the Mueller announcement was made we learned three new pieces of damaging news: that there were at least 18 contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russia in the seven months before the 2016 election; that Trump’s team knew Flynn was being investigated when he was appointed national security advisor; and that Flynn altered a military assault on Raqqa involving Kurdish soldiers, after being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Turkish government. Weary Trump staffers are reportedly polishing their resumes, fed up with the constant state of crisis. Trump, meanwhile, is stuck in the shrieking paranoia of his own mind.

It is too soon to talk about impeachment. Republicans, whatever they are saying in private, are still only making tepid criticisms publicly. But the Comey fever has lasted for ten days now and it shows no sign of abating. Between Mueller’s appointment and the flood of leaks, it has already done colossal and irreparable damage to Trump’s presidency.