A few days ago, we were told that Donald Trump had signed a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Details were not made available to the press immediately, but we were assured that this was a Big Deal.

“That was a tremendous day. Tremendous investments in the United States,” The so-called president said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs.”

I’ve been keeping an eye out for analysis of what jobs might be created, or whether Congress actually would approve it. but it turns out there’s nothing to approve.

That’s right; the Brookings Institution is reporting that there is no arms deal.

I’ve spoken to contacts in the defense business and on the Hill, and all of them say the same thing: There is no $110 billion deal. Instead, there are a bunch of letters of interest or intent, but not contracts. Many are offers that the defense industry thinks the Saudis will be interested in someday. So far nothing has been notified to the Senate for review. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arms sales wing of the Pentagon, calls them “intended sales.” None of the deals identified so far are new, all began in the Obama administration.

The author, Bruce Riedel, says that it’s doubtful the Saudis could pay for a $110 billion arms deal, anyway, given the price of oil these days.

So what was that dog and pony show in Riyadh about, anyway? I’ll bet you can guess, but here’s a hint:

The Trump International Hotel received about $270,000 from a lobbying campaign tied to the government of Saudi Arabia last year, according to a filing submitted to the Justice Department last week.

The filing from the MSLGroup, a public relations firm, shows that the group spent about $270,000 at the Trump International Hotel while conducting lobbying efforts on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government. MSLGroup was helping Saudi Arabia with several lobbying efforts, including opposing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which allows the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia.

Yes. The so-called president insults the mayor of London for allegedly being soft on terrorism; meanwhile, he’s been in bed with a group trying to prevent the Saudis from owning up to their role in 9/11. An attack on Trump’s city. What a guy.

Last night after I was done writing I learned that someone had leaked documents to The Intercept showing that the NSA knew about a Russian attempt to hack election officials and an election software company before the November 2016 election.

I found a discussion of this on social media, and apparently knowledgeable people in it said that what The Intercept published didn’t indicate that the Russians had succeeded in changing election results. What I’ve said all along: Whatever the Russians might have done, even if they hadn’t done it Hillary Clinton probably would have lost, anyway.

But this morning I fully expected to find media erupting in news about What Did the NSA Know, and When Did They Know It? Instead, it’s mostly subdued news stories about the NSA leaker.

If I were a suspicious sort of person, I would find this odd.

Yesterday’s Gallup daily tracking poll has Trump at 36 percent approve, 58 percent disapprove. That’s his lowest Gallup approval number yet. See also Donald Trump’s base is shrinking at FiveThirtyEight.

I recommend this article in WaPo by David Perry.

In early May, the white supremacist Jeremy Christian — who is accused of killing two men in Portland, Ore., on Friday — posted on Facebook, “Hail Vinland!!! Hail Victory!!!” “Victory” makes sense. Bigots feel empowered these days. But why “Vinland?” Why was this accused attacker talking about the short-lived Viking settlement in North America?

It turns out that white supremacy has gone fully medieval.

As the current contests over Confederate monuments exemplifies, Americans are accustomed to contested narratives about race and history fixating on the American South. Some of the most dangerous terrorists in the U.S., though, are looking much, much, farther north. Vinland was the name that a group of 10th-century Vikings, led by Leif Erikson, gave to a grapevine-rich island off what we believe is the coast of North America. For white supremacists, the concept of Vinland asserts a historical claim over North America, stretching especially from the Northeast coast to the Pacific Northwest. They use the myth of Vinland to position themselves as righteous defenders in the wars of race and religion they believe are coming.

Perry goes on to explain that the real Vikings of history weren’t as “whites only” as the white supremacists imagine, not to mention the fact that the Vinland colony was kind of a bust. But the Viking romanticism is interesting.

Having been raised in a whites-only community well stocked with people harboring racist beliefs, I noticed a long time ago that the worst white supremacists tend to be drearily ordinary. As a rule, they are not particularly bright, accomplished, educated, talented, successful or handsome. They are people who don’t stand out in any way except for the white supremacy thing.

And a long time ago it occurred to me that their very ordinariness was why they made such a Big Bleeping Deal about being white. It was the only attribute they had that made them special.

This is an entirely subjective opinion not backed up by scholarly studies, but I know my people. I sincerely believe a whole lot of these guys go down the white supremacy rabbit hole because they’ve come to live inside a myth that says their whiteness entitles them to greatness. In their own minds they are the heirs to a noble tradition of warrior-men who eventually will return in glory and re-assert their natural superiority over all those other people. And yeah, it’s nonsense, but it’s a fantasy that helps them avoid confronting how utterly banal they and their lives actually are.

We all go through our lives with an internal narrative in which we are the heroes, or at least the leading man or lady (or, if you are a bit warped, the martyr). People who are reasonably well-adjusted live with narratives that are, arguably, not completely divorced from objective reality. We may see ourselves as somewhat more charming or competent or better looking than others do, but as long as that doesn’t get in the way of interpersonal relationships, that’s probably harmless.

But when you see yourself as a noble elite warrior superior being, but you’re really a mediocre little nebbish with a beer gut, this is not healthy. Propping up your self-esteem is normal, but living inside a complete fantasy is not.

And yeah, the attachment to monuments that mythologize the Confederacy and the so-called Lost Cause is closely related to this same phenomenon. The romanticization of the Confederacy is another myth people use to make themselves feel they are part of something heroic, and we could do without it.

Sometimes the myths living in our hearts and subconscious really can elevate us, however. Perry continues,

Vinland wasn’t the only medieval presence at the Portland murders. Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche died fighting to protect the vulnerable people targeted by hate. Myrddin is the Welsh name for Merlin, the great wizard in the court of King Arthur. Taliesin was a 6th century Welsh poet who was later folded into the Arthurian legends. Their namesake died defending the vulnerable. His last words were, like a chivalric hero, to tell the people on the train that he loved them all.

I had recognized the names Taliesin and Myrddin, and as Perry is a Welsh surname, those names probably popped out to David Perry as they did to me. What a terrible waste.

History has never just been “the past.” As a historian, I study the way that groups have always tried to assert control over their story, seeking to mold legend, myth and reality into a useful narrative about identity and destiny. Stories like this have power, and we’d be foolish to ignore the threat.

Expanding this topic just a bit — it’s probably the case that people who have a normal amount of self-esteem, who are reasonably satisfied with their lives, and who feel connected to the communities they live in, are less likely to be sucked into Viking fantasy land than someone who feels alienated from himself and uncomfortable with the world.

“Religion and nationalism,” wrote the great philosopher/psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, “as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.”

There always will be individuals who, for many reasons, never find a place for themselves in the world. But when people form movements based on their shared fantasies, and when they start slashing people on trains, or on London Bridge, it becomes a bigger problem. Young men especially seem vulnerable to losing themselves this way, but any sort of person could be vulnerable.

From what I have seen of radical, militant Islam, the most extreme versions especially, it is less about religious devotion than it is about alienated people living in a fantasy about their own ethnic and cultural entitlements, and resentments, combined with myths of past glory and future destiny. That the fantasy is packaged in Islam speaks to the way Islam dominates history and cultural identity in some parts of the world, but Islam isn’t the primary cause.  I propose that Islamic terrorism basically stems from the same syndrome that inspires Jeremy Christian to live in a Viking fantasy.

And I don’t necessarily think this is “crazy.” I’ve heard nothing to make me thing Jeremy Christian is psychotic, as in hearing voices or seeing things that aren’t there. I’m not sure how a psychiatric professional would classify this, but seems to me it’s more of a social or cultural pathology than a “mental illness.”

And as we’re still sometimes having the argument about whether outreach to the white working class requires betraying racial equality, consider that racism is a common refuge for alienated white guys. And currently we’ve got a generation of white guys whose fathers had steady union jobs with good wages and benefits that are now long gone. If racism is growing in this population, the way to combat that is not to yell at them, but to come up with ways to help them feel connected to a more progressive vision. Martin Longman has some thoughts on this.

And it’s likely that “getting tough” and dropping bombs will have little impact on terrorism in the Muslim world, except maybe to make it grow.

And we must tackle the myths, head on. For example, tear down the Confederate monuments that mythologize the Confederacy; replace the myths with the actual history of the Confederacy and the brutality of slavery. We’ve let the “Lost Cause” nonsense fester far too long. The play-pretend Vikings may be a little harder to reach. But David Perry writes,

American white supremacists want to make Vinland great again, laying out an imagined past in which Vikings are the rightful conquerors of North America, locked in eternal battle with the Skraelings, the Viking slur for indigenous people. We must inoculate ourselves against this hate by telling a better story, one that recognizes the many errors of our past, but also lays out a vision for a more inclusive future.

That last part is most important, I think.

In today’s New York Times, we read that the CEO of Yahoo has been making $900,000 a week for running her company into the ground.

When a withered Yahoo is absorbed by Verizon Communications in the next week or so, it will be the end of an era for one of the pioneering names of the internet age.

It will also conclude the remarkable five-year run of Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, who was paid nearly a quarter of a billion dollars — a generous sum even by Silicon Valley’s lofty standards — while presiding over the company’s continued decline.

Ms. Mayer, now 42, was hailed as a savior when she left Google for Yahoo in 2012. But during her tenure, Yahoo was hit by two of the biggest privacy breaches in history. Advertisers, Yahoo’s bread and butter, fled the service. Users shifted ever more attention to Google, Facebook and other rivals. Yahoo’s staff shrank by almost 50 percent.

The company ended up so weakened that its board had little choice but to sell.

Mayer will make about made about $239 million on the sale.

Now, we might think that Yahoo stockholders must be really pissed off at Mayer. Apparently not, because she made them a lot of money.  As the once-significant Yahoo faded into obscurity,  for some reason stock prices kept going up. This was mostly because of other companies in which Yahoo invested. Mayer is brilliant at handling investments; she’s not good at running companies. And the Board of Directors allowed this situation to fester for five  years.

Yahoo’s board recognized Ms. Mayer’s failure to meet business targets and docked her bonuses and stock awards in four of the five years she was in charge. But under terms of her original employment agreement, it also granted her new shares annually, easing the sting.

The biggest financial price she paid for her mistakes came this year, when she gave up her cash bonus for 2016 and equity awards for 2017 — about $14 million — as a penalty for management’s failure to act on evidence of the theft of data from 500 million accounts in 2014. That incident, along with the 2013 breach of one billion accounts, prompted Verizon to renegotiate its original purchase agreement with Yahoo, shaving $350 million from the $4.83 billion price.

There are people defending Mayer and saying that Yahoo wasn’t fixable. And that’s probably true; it was over the hill five years ago and more. I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I had anything to do with Yahoo. Still, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around all that money. It’s like really big businesses like Yahoo, failures or not, operate outside of the normal laws of physics.

Meanwhile, WaPo covered the annual Walmart annual shareholder meeting. “They highlighted recent investments in training and technology and talked about the importance of cutting costs while increasing sales. Each 1-percent decrease in expenses amounts to a $1 billion savings for the company, Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs (introduced by Shelton as ‘the pharaoh of finance’) told shareholders.”

Among their cost-cutting innovations? They want employees to deliver packages on their way home from work. I’m not making that up.

Earlier in the week, the company announced it is enlisting employees to deliver online orders on their way home from work. The effort, meant to cut costs by eliminating third-party delivery services, is being tested in three U.S. stores.

And this happened:

But some employees were less concerned about the future than the present. A handful of shareholders and Walmart workers presented proposals at the meeting, calling on the company to treat its workers better by offering higher wages, improved benefits and more predictable schedules.

“An unfair leave policy, reduced hours and low pay make it difficult for most of us to pay our bills and take care of our families,” said Carolyn Davis, who works at a Walmart store in Outer Banks, N.C., and was representing the activist group Organization United for Respect Walmart. “Walmart can, and should, live up to the promises it makes: letting us take care of our children when they are sick, and accepting our doctor’s notes.”

Janie Grice, an employee from Marion, S.C., asked the company to offer more information on gender and racial information on the company’s part- and full-time workers.

“Too many of us are still part-time,” she said. “Too many of us have schedules and hours that change so frequently, we can’t plan our lives or line up a second job. Too many of us still can’t pay our bills.”

The meeting adjourned with no action taken on any of the above issues.

 At Informed Comment, Juan Cole wonders if Trump’s climate change disavowal will kill capitalism.

It wasn’t Donald Trump or alt-NeoNazi Steve Bannon who was mainly responsible for taking the US back out of the Paris climate accord.

It was the Koch Brothers and the rest of Big Oil, and Big Gas, and Big Coal.

It was “energy” corporations who have vast inventories of worthless fossil fuels that they want to unload on the marks quick before everybody realizes they have all the usefulness for human beings of eating arsenic.

There are some well run companies in the world that improve people’s lives. But if corporate America is willing to alternately cook and drown our grandchildren to make a quick buck today, then they are our enemies. They are monsters. Period.

Some oil and gas companies have been critical of Trump’s plan to withdraw from the Paris agreement. But the Koch boys do seem bent on destroying the planet.

The New York Times just published a news story about How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science.

Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries (which can process 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day) as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil.

Government rules intended to slow climate change are “making people’s lives worse rather than better,” Charles Koch explained in a rare interview last year with Fortune, arguing that despite the costs, these efforts would make “very little difference in the future on what the temperature or the weather will be.”

And there is copious evidence showing that climate change denialism has been funded by money from the fossil fuel industries going back years. See “Dark Money Funds Climate Change Denialism,” for example.

Back to Juan Cole:

The compact we had with the corporations had already been reneged on long ago. They were supposed to make and distribute goods efficiently and provide an ever better standard of living to American workers.

But the real value of the average wage of a worker hasn’t increased since 1970.

The cost of a college education for a middle class family has skyrocketed, making it harder for families to get ahead. Graduates go out into the world with $150k debt.

Inequality is spiking. The opportunity for young people to rise beyond their social class has declined dramatically in US. America is no longer the land of opportunity.

So the compact between the public and the corporations was already in trouble. Workers still have not recovered from the 2008-9 crash.

The glib and deeply dishonest attempt of Big Carbon to represent the repudiation of the Paris accords as a victory for American workers will quickly be seen through. Factory jobs in the US have declined, but not because of environmental regulation. The big factor has been robotification. Coal jobs are not coming back.

The American public has shown itself incredibly patient as they watched a handful of corporations simply buy congressmen and senators and have them vote for the interests of the super-rich and against the interests of Americans.

 One more time — if the leaders of the Democratic Party had a lick of sense, they’d realize that most of their “brand” problem comes from the fact that they’re about as compromised as the Republicans in this regard, and their fortunes are not likely to turn around until they stop trying to merely negotiate between the interests of Big Money and the interests of some of their voters. They need to stand up for working people, period.

The bottom line is that these news stories highlight the failure of capitalism to be sustainable unless you regulate the hell out of it. The question is, will capitalism be reined in before or after it destroys American democracy, not to mention the planet?

WaPo explains:

Leaving the Paris Agreement itself is an easy, but lengthy, task.

The deal was specifically designed so that the U.S. could join without the need for congressional approval. On Aug. 29, 2016, President Barack Obama wrote a short letter, which was deposited at the United Nations, signaling that the United States would join the agreement.

A short letter from President Trump will suffice to reverse this action. According to the Paris Agreement, nations that want to withdraw only have to leave a written notice in a U.N. depository.

But Trump won’t be able to write this letter until three years after the Paris Agreement came into force — that is to say, not until Nov. 4, 2019 — thanks to a clause in the deal itself.

It then takes another year before the U.S. can leave the agreement — bringing it to Nov. 4, 2020 — which is also the day after the next presidential election.

So we’ve still got some time. Trump’s bonehead decision could be reversible.   However, it won’t be renegotiated.

Mr. Trump said he wanted to negotiate a better deal for the United States, and the administration said he had placed calls to the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Canada to personally explain his decision. A statement from the White House press secretary said the president “reassured the leaders that America remains committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and to robust efforts to protect the environment.”

But within minutes of the president’s remarks, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement saying that the Paris climate accord was “irreversible” and could not be renegotiated.

My suspicions are that in most of the world, Trump is so toxic that any politician who appears to be trying to appease him in any way can kiss his or her career goodbye. But we’ll see.

The timing of this pretty much guarantees that climate change will become a real campaign issue, finally. Greg Sargent writes,

Now that President Trump and the Republican Party have told the rest of the world to get lost, there is a way for Democrats to step up and signal to other countries that the United States remains committed to combating the long-term threat of global warming — even if Trump and the GOP are determined to render the United States a global outlier.

But to do this, they’ll have to win a lot of gubernatorial races in the next two years. Which means Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord raises the stakes for the three dozen 2017 and 2018 contests in a new way. … There are three dozen contests set for 2017 and 2018 — most of which are in states currently held by Republicans, and almost all of them in the latter year — and winning some key ones could help go a long way.

 A whole bunch of governors and mayors — all Dems, I believe — have vowed to continue to meet the Paris agreement goals. And much of corporate America has spoken out against Trump’s announcement.  The exception to that would be coal industry executives.

… coal company Murray Energy, and its friends at various conservative think tanks, helped convince Trump that Paris put the US “at a very, very big economic disadvantage.” So did the National Association of Manufacturers and the Industrial Energy Consumers of America, out of fears that their energy costs would increase. And according to Timmons Roberts at Brookings, in the past two weeks, the Competitive Enterprise Institute ran 70 ads against the agreement.

However,

Even major oil firms like Chevron (CVX) and BP (BP) have publicly backed the deal.

ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods wrote a personal letter to Trump earlier this month, urging him to stick to the deal. The U.S., he said, is “well positioned to compete” with the agreement in place and staying in means “a seat at the negotiating table to ensure a level playing field.”

Oil companies like the agreement because it favors natural gas (which they produce) over dirtier coal.

Coal is on its way out, no matter what happens. Industry itself has moved on. Coal jobs are not coming back. People need to understand that environmental regulations are not the problem.

How this could play out — First, if Trump had been smarter, he would have waited until November or so to announce his withdrawal from the Paris Agreements. Another overheated summer, some western wildfires, a category 5 hurricane or two — it’s not clear to me how much Americans actually worry about climate change, but over the next few months Trump’s decision is going to come up in news coverage every time there’s some new weather craziness to deal with.

Second, this could be a real rallying cry for special elections and the 2018 midterms. Democrats running for city and state offices can run on standing up to Trump on climate change, and that’s the sort of issue that could bring millennial voters out of the woodwork and to the polls. I hope that’s what happens, anyway.

Corporate America may wake up to the danger of supporting politicians who are climate change deniers. I’m not holding my breath, but it could happen.

And then there’s the very real possibility that Trump will be bounced out of office before November 2019. He would likely be replaced by another climate change denier, Pence or Ryan. But if the decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement has become unpopular enough by that time, there’s a chance the official letter just won’t be sent.

And even if the withdrawal becomes complete in November 2020, the next president may make re-entering the agreement his first priority.

In other words, there’s a real possibility Trump’s bonehead decision will be reversed, eventually, one way or another, and maybe it won’t be too late. Maybe.

So the great orange moron pulled us out of the Paris climate agreement, as expected. See also Trump just betrayed the world. Now the world will fight back.

Comedian Kathy Griffin posed with what looks like the severed head of Donald Trump. Although some are defending this as “performance art,” I say it was a boneheaded thing to do, and I won’t be sorry if she loses work because of it.

Suggesting violence toward a real, living person is stupid and reckless. “It was just a joke” is no excuse. It was wrong, and not funny, when Ann Coulter said “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee.” It was wrong when righties burned President Obama in effigy and erected billboards suggesting he should be lynched.  Stooping to the Right’s level accomplishes nothing.

Here’s a post I wrote back in 2007 about humor as aggression. In it, I wrote that political art should be judged by the point it makes. Is the point true? Or is it just about mocking someone the artist doesn’t like? What point is Griffin making other than “I want Donald Trump dead”? There are copious things about Trump that are worthy of being mocked; why stoop to this?

I don’t like him, either, but I don’t want him dead. I want him investigated; I want his transgressions exposed; I want him out of office. If his maladministration is soundly ridiculed along the way, fine by me. But no, I don’t wish any physical harm to him. Maybe I’ve been a Buddhist for too long, but that’s how I feel.

Adding more hate and aggression into our political discourse accomplishes nothing. Roger Cohen wrote yesterday,

Tens of millions of Trump opponents cannot communicate with tens of millions of his supporters. There is no viable vocabulary. There is no shared reality.

This is the chasm to which Fox News, Republican debunking of reason and science, herd-reinforcing social media algorithms, liberal arrogance, rightist bigotry, and an economy of growing inequality have ushered us.

It’s perhaps the most important problem confronting the United States, because the end point of hardening fracture and mutual incomprehension is violence — like last week’s fatal stabbing of two men by a Muslim-insulting white supremacist on a Portland commuter train.

America is full of enraged people just looking for an excuse to act out their rage. Feeding the rage is irresponsible. Political expression that expresses nothing but hate or a wish for violence is self-indulgent and stupid.

It’s almost not worth blogging the Trump-Russia scandal, because as soon as I have an angle to blog about a new story comes out that changes things. Watergate oozed along at a snail’s pace; this story moves at light speed.

In more or less reverse order — the most recent headline is that Trump’s personal lawyer has refused requests from both the House and Senate investigations for more information.

President Donald Trump’s longtime ally and personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has refused congressional requests to provide “information and testimony” pertinent to their investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, ABC News reported Tuesday.

“I declined the invitation to participate as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered,” Cohen told ABC via email of the requests for his contacts with Kremlin-linked officials.

Josh Marshall says that the investigators’ interest in Michael Cohen is “very bad news for Donald Trump.”

In simple terms, whatever happened during the 2016 campaign, if I wanted to understand Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the countries of the former Soviet Union and money from those countries and emigres from those countries, there’s no single person I’d want to look at more closely than Michael Cohen.

Read the article for all the ways Cohen has been a significant link between Trump and Russia. He’ll get a subpoena eventually.

Earlier today, CNN reported that Russians had bragged about owning Trump:

Many could not help but notice how the so-called president was all smiles with the Saudis and all scowls in Europe. Why so nasty with the Europeans?

Notice that Josh Marshall wrote this before the news about Jared Kushner broke yesterday.

President Trump’s visit to Brussels/Europe wasn’t just another grab bag of impulsive aggression and gaffes. It wasn’t scattershot. It was quite clearly focused on destabilizing and perhaps eviscerating the NATO Alliance and somewhat secondarily, but relatedly, the European Union. This has been the strategic goal of Russia and before it the Soviet Union for decades. The sum total of everything that happened on this trip casts the entire Trump/Russia story in a decidedly more ominous light.

And the light was already quite ominous.

This is a significant point, I think:

On virtually every other issue he is almost infinitely malleable and susceptible to blandishments and praise. Except this one. Here he remains fixed on True North.

Remember, we went through the NATO Thing when Angela Merkel allegedly set him straight about his nutty idea that Germany owed NATO dues to the U.S. Trump appeared to soften his anti-NATO position, for a time. This happened just as The Atlantic was publishing a major feature called “Trump’s Plan to End Europe,” by David Frum. The Atlantic added a disclaimer to the article, but frankly, they needn’t have bothered. In Brussels this week Trump gave an ungracious speech, scolding allies for being cheapskates and refusing to explicitly reaffirm Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which states that an attack on any member is an attack on all. Trump is the only U.S. president since NATO was founded who has not clearly stated commitment to Article 5.

Frum pointed out that Trump has surrounded himself with anti-European Union ideologues, such as Steve Bannon.  (I saw a PBS program on Bannon last week. Bannon strikes me as a man of mediocre intellect and with an adolescent’s simplistic view of the world, who has nevertheless set himself up as an “expert” because he is so supremely sure of himself, and because as a white man he gets benefits of doubts. Watching it made me think of the Kevin Klein character from A Fish Called Wanda. Except Bannon isn’t funny.) And that reminded me of something I quoted earlier this week by Josh Marshall:

Trump used a very high profile and public moment to chastise our NATO allies for not paying enough for their own defense and actually owing the US vast sums of money. As I explained below, this is demonstrably false, both in a general and specific sense. Beyond the inaccuracy, Trump’s comments clearly envision a transformed and debilitated NATO, one that is one half protection racket, one half high-dollar membership golf resort. You pay your dues or you’re out. It’s a service, not a commitment.

Trump also declined to pledge his support for Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, the provision that commits all members states – but most importantly the US – to defend members who are attacked. Article 5 isn’t a key part of NATO. It’s the cornerstone. In many respects it is NATO.

Meanwhile, a report in der Spiegel suggests Trump viciously attacked German and its export practices in a meeting of NATO/EU leaders. His team also created confusion among their EU interlocutors by appearing not to understand that EU member states only make trade deals as a group. It’s a bit hard to decipher precisely what was being discussed here. Was this really a misunderstanding or a bullheaded effort to make a point?

See also an article Anne Applebaum wrote back in July 2016:

Russia is clearly participating in the Trump campaign. The theft of material from the Democratic National Committee a few weeks ago was the work of Russian hackers. Russian state media and social media, together with a host of fake websites and Twitter accounts with Russian origins, actively support Trump and are contributing to some of the hysteria on the Internet. I’m not arguing that any of this has been decisive. But whatever resources Putin wagered on Trump, they are paying off.

For even if Trump never becomes president, his candidacy has already achieved two extremely important Russian foreign policy goals: to weaken the moral influence of the United States by undermining its reputation as a stable democracy, and to destroy its power by wrecking its relationships with its allies. Toward these ends, Trump has begun repeating arguments identical to those used on Russian state television. These range from doubts about the sovereignty of Ukraine — earlier this week, Trump’s campaign team helped alter the Republican party platform to remove support for Ukraine — to doubts about U.S. leadership of the democratic world. The United States has its own “mess” to worry about, Trump told the New York Times on Wednesday: It shouldn’t stand up for democracy abroad. In the same interview, he also cast doubt on the fundamental basis of transatlantic stability, NATO’s Article 5 guarantee: If Russia invades, he said, he’d have to think first before defending U.S. allies.

Putin wants Europe undermined. A suspicious person might think Trump is working for Putin.