Lede From Behind

When he decided on the Syria airstrike in April 2017 he was watching Rogue One on the presidential plane. Via metro.co.uk.

Mr. President, the Wolf is at the door.

Wolf Blitzer, that is. Mrs. Trump prefers CNN:

WASHINGTON — On the first couple’s recent trip overseas, Melania Trump’s television aboard Air Force One was tuned to CNN. President Trump was not pleased.

He raged at his staff for violating a rule that the White House entourage should begin each trip tuned to Fox — his preferred network over what he considers the “fake news” CNN — and caused “a bit of a stir” aboard Air Force One, according to an email obtained by The New York Times. The email, an internal exchange between officials in the White House Military Office and the White House Communications Agency last Thursday, also called for the ordering of two additional televisions to support Beam, a TiVo-like streaming device, to make sure the president and first lady could both watch TV in their separate hotel rooms when they travel.

From Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman, reporting from the Inner Courtyard of the Imperial Bedchambers. I think it's funny that he screamed at the staff for failing to prevent Mrs. T. from indulging in this strange predilection for watching news programs where they say stuff that's more or less true, instead of at her for not controlling herself. Apparently that's not the issue; he doesn't hope to stop her, he just doesn't want her to do it in his plane, or his bedroom. What she does in her own bedroom is her own business.

When Trump was protecting our honest, bullied washing machine manufacturers from vicious, manipulative foreign competitors, he didn't realize that the honest, bullied washing machine manufacturers were customers for vicious, manipulative foreign steel. So they fell apart anyway. Oops! Via Yglesias.

Trump discovers the New Deal.

This goes back to the beginning of the month, when agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue started talking about pulling the 1933 Commodity Credit Corporation out of the attic, dusting it off, and opening a $30-billion fund to pay off farmers for the damage Trump was doing them with his persecution of a senseless world war on trade. Farmers weren't impressed:

“It’s a whole lot easier not to wreck the car in the first place than it is to think about what a repair might look like,” a spokesman for the American Soybean Association told The New York Times earlier this year. 

Now it's $12 billion, just for the soybean farmers, and it's nothing like enough, apparently, as Chinese buyers have switched to Brazil and Argentina rather than pay the 25% tariff, and the price of US soybeans is collapsing with the sudden shrinkage of the market. It won't last (China needs a lot of soybeans), but after Trump eventually caves in the next few weeks and everything returns to normal American farmers will still be paying for it, rebuilding the markets Trump has driven off the cliff,

Another victory over sabotage. Trump surrenders to Obamacare once more. https://t.co/rR0xhl1cd1

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) July 25, 2018

The Affordable Care Act escapes death again.

As the administration pulls back on its threat to suspend the risk adjustment program that protects insurance companies and particularly co-op insurers from losses under the ACA's requirement that they not penalize the sick. It's really extraordinary how durable this law is:

The administration suspended the program less than three weeks ago, saying it was compelled to do so by a federal court decision in New Mexico.

But the administration said Tuesday that it would restore the program because otherwise health plans could become insolvent or withdraw from the market, causing chaos for consumers.

In adopting a new rule, the administration essentially accepted the arguments of critics, including consumer groups, health insurance companies and Democrats in Congress, who said that suspending the payments would cause turmoil in insurance markets.

And tacitly admitted that their pretext for suspending the payments—the ruling by Judge James Browning in Albuquerque that the formula for calculating the payments needed to be changed—was bogus. They didn't even change the formula, which they presumably should.