The Financial Times reports that the former first couple are selling two books as part of a package deal—and that bidding has reached $60 million, which is an insane amount of money. That’s the equivalent of roughly 17 Lena Dunham book deals, six Amy Schumer book deals, or four Bill Clinton book deals.

Clinton got $15 million for My Life, perhaps the dullest book ever written; George W. Bush got $10 million for the almost as boring Decision Points. The point is that books by former presidents sell copies, even though they’re rarely very good. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs are the gold standard, and they’re only good because he was dying and broke and needed to make sure his family had money after he died, which he did shortly after he finished writing. But Obama’s track record as a writer—his previous books were both bestsellers—suggests that his book could get a boost from actually being good. Similarly, people are nostalgic for Obama’s presidency already and his book will tap into that energy as long as it comes out in the next three and a half years.

The Financial Times notes Obama’s book earnings: “Mr Obama earned $8.8 million from The Audacity of Hope, a 2006 bestseller, and the children’s book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, according to a report by Forbes. Sales of his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, published in paperback in 2004, brought in a further $6.8 million in royalties, according to Forbes.” Though the FT seems to be suggesting this is an indication that the Obamas are being overpaid, his hefty royalties in fact suggest his sales record is strong enough to maybe kind of sort of justify paying $60 million.

Still, sixty million dollars sounds like a lot! But it’s for two books and it includes world rights—so you can figure that one book is going for $15 million for North American rights. If the books are sold for $30 each at a standard 50 percent discount, the two books would have to sell four million copies worldwide to hit $60 million in revenue. (Obviously there are production and other costs, so the number is probably slightly—but not significantly—higher.) That’s a lot of copies, but it’s not an outlandish number of copies. (I wrote about how advances work and why a publisher would pay tens of millions for a book back in 2015, if you want more context.)

According to the report, Penguin Random House—the publishing industry’s largest corporation, which was essentially created for the purpose of doing deals like this—is leading the charge, but lesser giants such as Simon & Schuster (which has been in the news a lot lately!), Macmillan, and HarperCollins are contending. Finally, the fact that the deal is for both books is a bit weird—it inflates both advances, despite the fact that they are different books about different things. Similarly, if you want to publish Barack, you have to publish Michelle. (To be fair, I’m pretty sure every major publisher would be perfectly happy to publish either.)

But the money is not the most important thing about this deal. The most important thing is that it is definitely exponentially more money than Donald Trump got for Crippled America, or any of his other books. And that means that this deal will make Donald Trump extremely mad.

Update: Penguin Random House announced it would be publishing Barack and Michelle Obama’s books, for an undisclosed sum.

Asked about the recent bomb threats against Jewish community centers and the desecration of a number of Jewish cemeteries, Trump reportedly told a group of state attorneys general that anti-Semitism might not actually be to blame. Instead, he said this:

This is characteristically tough to parse. (For all that is made of Trump’s gift for insults, he struggles with concepts more complex than “Jeb Bush is a pussy” or “Ted Cruz is a creep.”) But the implication here is that Jews are desecrating their own cemeteries and calling bomb threats into their own community centers for the sole purpose of embarrassing him.

Whether Trump is suggesting Jews specifically are engaging in false flag operations or that some unnamed group is doing so, this is bonkers. But it’s largely in keeping with Trump’s approach to crisis. Trump is unable to take responsibility for anything, as we saw in his horrific response to the death of a Navy SEAL—Trump OK’d the mission, but blamed the military for its execution. Here, he’s merely muddying the waters, albeit in what might be the most immoral and disgusting way possible.

The raid that President Donald Trump ordered on the village of Yakla in Yemen in late January increasingly looks like a botched mission. It garnered no significant intelligence and had a terrible cost in human life: American soldier William “Ryan” Owens and at least 14 civilians were killed. Speaking on Fox News on Tuesday morning, Trump made clear that responsibility for the failed sortie belongs to someone else, anyone else—the military, former President Barack Obama, but certainly not Trump himself.

“This was a mission that was started before I got here,” Trump said. “This was something they wanted to do. They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do—the generals—who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.... This was something that they were looking at for a long time doing, and according to [Defense Secretary James] Mattis it was a very successful mission. They got tremendous amounts of information.”

President Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that read, “The buck stops here!” Earlier presidents adhered to that adage by accepting responsibility for military deaths under their command. The sign on Trump’s desk should read, “The buck stops anywhere but here!”

Abramoff is back! The disgraced former lobbyist/symbol of corruption/inspiration for James Spader’s character in The Blacklist/guy we should thank for making it impossible to wear a fedora is reportedly working with an African strongman and (arguably) America’s worst congressman Dana Rohrabacher. Per Politico (emphasis added):

Abramoff agreed to act as a liaison between his European friends whom he declined to name, the president of the Republic of Congo, and Rohrabacher to try to establish a coalition of African states to defeat the terrorist group Boko Haram. Abramoff’s friends—who Abramoff said he believes have financial investments in Congo—were in talks with the country’s controversial president, Denis Sassou Nguesso, to try to enlist the United States to support the coalition.

Abramoff approached Rohrabacher, whom he has known since the 1980s, with a proposal: Could the California Republican, who at one point was mentioned in news reports about a position in the Trump administration, help secure U.S. backing for the African alliance to defeat Boko Haram? At the behest of his European friends, Abramoff also wanted to see if Rohrabacher could arrange for a meeting between Sassou Nguesso and Trump, then the president-elect.

What is going on with the use of the word “friends” here? This reads like “friends of friends,” the antiquated and sinister mafioso term. But the real story here is that Abramoff has decided that forging links between strongmen and Trump—under the pretense of fighting terrorism—is the right career move right now. That shouldn’t be too surprising. If Abramoff was ever going to make a comeback, this is the time to do it. Abramoff is the id—or perhaps simply (with apologies to Paul Pierce) the truth—of the contemporary Republican Party. Perhaps only he can meld Trumpian corruption with Trumpian affection for authoritarians.

Axios has obtained a draft executive order slated for Tuesday that starts the long process of gutting one of President Barack Obama’s major rules to protect American waterways. The order directs EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to begin rescinding the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, a controversial regulation that gave Clean Water Act protections to 2 million miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands that link to drinking water systems across the country.

The Obama administration, environmentalists, sportsmen, and craft beer companies loved this rule, because one-third of Americans get their drinking water from sources connected to these smaller water sources. But the rule also saw unprecedented opposition from not the fossil fuel industry, farmers, ranchers, small business groups, and real estate developers who said the rule gave the feds too much control over really small bodies of water.

As it stands right now, though, the rule was not being implemented anyway. It was stayed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 2015. And under Trump, the Justice Department will no longer defend the rule, according to Axios. This comes two weeks after Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation restricting coal companies from polluting waterways with mining waste.

Trump is famously impressionable. Back in August, the Washington Post’s Robert Costa reported, “Trump tends to echo the words of whomever last spoke to him, making direct access to him even more valuable.” This is, to put it mildly, not a great quality for a chief executive. But we’ve already seen it on display a number of times during his short presidency—only a few days ago John Kasich came close to saving Obamacare during a conversation with the president:

After meeting with Ohio Gov. John Kasich last Friday, he seemed to show the governor support on his plan and had Secretary Tom Price meet with Kasich on Saturday, even though Kasich’s plan contrasted with current Washington thinking. Kasich came away unclear whether his plan would get any more traction.

Trump’s impressionability was on full display in an interview with Fox & Friends that aired on Tuesday morning, ahead of his anticipated not-State of the Union address. In that interview, Trump was asked by Brian Kilmeade if he thought Barack Obama was “behind” the protests that have erupted at town halls across the country:

The headlines that have accompanied this video have been accurate—usually along the lines of: “Trump: Obama possibly behind leaks, protests.” But it took a hell of a lot of prodding to get him there, through a briar patch of leading phrases. Trump is asked: “It turns out [Obama’s] organization seems to do a lot of these organizing to some of the protests that these Republicans are seeing around the country against you. Do you believe President Obama is behind it and if he is, is that a violation of the so-called unsaid presidents’ code?” (Organizing for America, the group being referred to here, has become a boogeyman on the right, but is nowhere near as all-powerful as conservatives would like it to be.)

When Trump still doesn’t take the bait—“I think it’s politics,” he shrugs—Kilmeade jumps in again: “But Bush wasn’t going after Clinton; Clinton wasn’t going after Bush.” And then, finally, the mind-meld is complete. Trump gives the answer that Kilmeade was looking for, which is that Obama and his people are behind both the leaks coming out of the White House and the protests.

So, yes, Trump is reading from the Nixon playbook once again, blaming one of his predecessors for his political troubles. But the other story here is that Trump is the kind of horse that will drink the water once you’ve brought him to it. In just a few seconds, if you prime him right, he will say whatever you want him to say.

The press secretary just had a very bad weekend. In an attempt to find out who has been leaking stories to the press, Spicer made his staffers dump their phones out on a table for lawyers and him to look through—a move that was quickly leaked to the press. When asked about the incident this morning in an interview with the smitten hosts of Fox & Friends, Trump told them, “I would have handled it differently than Sean.” He asserted that he would have had “one-on-one” sessions with suspected leakers. At these sessions, he might have done things that were “a hell of a lot worse” than checking their phones. In what could be described as the worst performance review compliment sandwich ever, Trump did at least grudgingly admit that “Sean Spicer is a fine human being.” (Not true.)  

Trump is clearly angry that the leaks are still happening, and it looks like Spicer’s miserable life is not going to get any less miserable any time soon. Of course, people are more likely to leak stories to the press when their bosses are being horrible to them. And at the White House, it’s horrible bosses all the way down.

After she and President Donald Trump met with leaders of Historically Black Colleges and Universities at the White House on Monday, the education secretary issued this statement:

They started from the fact that there were too many students in America who did not have equal access to education. They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution.

HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality.

There’s just one problem. These schools came about precisely because black Americans typically had no choice, no options, and no access to education under segregation. As Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan‏ points out, DeVos’s own department website explains this: “Prior to the time of their establishment, and for many years afterwards, blacks were generally denied admission to traditionally white institutions.”

This isn’t DeVos’s first gaffe since her swearing-in earlier this month. (She managed to insult teachers on what should have been a routine visit to a Washington, D.C., public school.) Yet this incident reinforces a central concern that emerged from DeVos’s confirmation hearing—one that’s separate from the ideological fights over “choice,” charters, vouchers, and the like. Simply put, the education secretary doesn’t seem to know a whole lot about education.

This controversy also comes amid the Trump administration’s effort to increase support for historically black colleges and universities. Trump will reportedly sign an executive order on Tuesday moving an Education Department program promoting these schools under the White House’s purview. DeVos, meanwhile, is slated to speak at a Library of Congress summit congressional Republicans are holding with school leaders. That might be even more awkward than previously anticipated.

Trump loves the Oscars. It was clear for most of the 2000s that he desperately wanted to host the ceremony, which is pathetic even by his standards. But the most pathetic thing about Trump is that he was also an Oscars recapper. This video from 2012 is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, partly because Trump appears to be reading his insane hot take off of cue cards.

Still, ranting about how he wishes Sasha Baron Cohen got beat up and sent to the hospital, saying that the Oscars’ security guards should go to security guard school, and making the unbelievable claim that “many people are asking me about the Academy Awards”—this is some 🔥🔥🔥 shit. If you’re going to recap the Oscars, come out with guns blazing.

But Trump largely stayed quiet about last night’s Academy Awards, presumably because Reince Priebus shoved his phone down his pants or perhaps because he was promised a blackened, catsup-covered steak (or maybe a hairless cat?) if he could be a good boy and not tweet for 16 hours. (This is not as damning or as telling as Trump’s silence on other issues but it seems clear that Trump’s inner circle has grown very, very tired of his tendency to create unnecessary distractions.)

That changed on Monday afternoon, however, when Trump told former livejournal/current Tiger Beat of the white supremacist set Breitbart that he was not impressed with the Oscars. “I think they were focused so hard on politics that they didn’t get the act together at the end,” Trump told the website, referring to the screw-up that will define it forever. “It was a little sad. It took away from the glamour of the Oscars. It didn’t feel like a very glamorous evening. I’ve been to the Oscars. There was something very special missing, and then to end that way was sad.”

This is very funny! For one thing, Donald Trump is complaining about missing glamour—from an award show that four years ago kicked off with a song called “We Saw Your Boobs.” But it’s hard to get over just how sad this is. Donald Trump loved the Oscars more than anything, but now that he’s president, the Oscars are all about talking about how bad he is. This is Trump’s version of his favorite movie Citizen Kane—he got what he wanted most in the world, but in the process lost the thing he loved the most.