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Sessions said in a statement that he recused himself because he was abiding by the law.

"To not recuse myself from that investigation, of which I was a target as a senior campaign official and a witness, would have been breaking the law. I do not and will not break the law," Sessions. "I did the right thing for the country and for President Trump. If I, as a target of the investigation, had broken the law by not recusing myself, it would have been a catastrophe for the rule of law and for the President."

The President was asked during a Friday morning call to "Fox & Friends" if there would have been a Russia probe had Bill Barr, the current attorney general, been attorney general during the start of the Trump administration.

"No, there wouldn't be. He would have stopped it immediately. ... Jeff Sessions was a disaster. I made him -- I didn't want to make him attorney general but he was the first senator to endorse me so I felt a little bit of an obligation," Trump said.

Trump added that Sessions "came to see me four times, just begging me to be attorney general. He wasn't, you know, to me, equipped to be attorney general. But he wanted and wanted and wanted it."

Sessions said in his statement that he continues to support Trump and will vote for him in the fall, but he said he "never begged for the job of Attorney General, not 4 times, not 1 time, not ever."

On "Fox and Friends," Trump said of Sessions, "He goes in -- he was so bad in his nomination proceedings. I should have gotten rid of him there," adding that he "knew less about Russia than I did."

"But they got him standing on a line with Kislyak ... everyone in Washington knew Kislyak," he remarked.

While past US presidents have largely left the Justice Department and, within it, the FBI, to be independent, Trump has said he has seen himself as the country's "chief law enforcement officer" -- a title typically used to refer to the attorney general.

Barr's Justice Department has acted more as an arm of Trump's defense than an independent arbiter of justice.

"The fix is in," said Honig, a legal analyst for CNN.

"This is an absolute injustice. Michael Flynn lied to the FBI, he pled guilty under oath in federal court to doing that, he took a plea, and then what does Bill Barr do? He says of all the tens of thousands of cases he's been in charge of in the Department of Justice, look at that one," Honig said. "And now we see Bill Barr doing Donald Trump's dirty work."

CNN's Marshall Cohen, Joe Johns Kaitlan Collins and Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.

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Sessions responds to Trump attack: 'I do not and will not break the law' - CNN

Teenagers in the United States are informed about their political world and capable of effectively evaluating political leaders, including President Donald Trump.

This statement runs counter to stereotypes that adults tend to hold about teens. Ask most adults to describe the political abilities of the typical American adolescent and you may hear words like apathetic, uninformed and immature.

But a study I conducted in 2017 with Laura-Wray Lake of UCLA, Amy Syvertsen of the Search Institute and two of my graduate students, Lauren Alvis and Katelyn Romm, indicates that high school students are much more knowledgeable and have stronger feelings about their political world than they are usually given credit for.

We asked more than 1,400 high school students in grades 9 to 12 to evaluate President Trump and provide reasons for their approval or disapproval of the president. The teenagers came from Southern California near Los Angeles, suburban Minnesota and rural West Virginia. They were diverse 43% identified as Latino, 34% as white, 13% as African American and 6% as Asian American and lived in communities that support and oppose Trump.

Several key themes emerged from the responses.

One was enthusiasm. Teens had a lot to say about Trump. Both youth who approved of Trump and those who did not provided thoughtful reasons for their views of the president. Many youth wrote sophisticated responses that counter stereotypes of adolescents as indifferent to their political world.

Another theme was knowledge. Teens supported their views by pointing to specific policies or statements by the president. Many of them justified their opinions by mentioning Trumps policies on social and political issues such as economic policy, abortion and relationships with foreign countries.

A large percentage of teens mentioned immigration, pointing to specific Trump statements or policy proposals, like the construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

An 18-year-old female, for example, expressed her approval of Trumps immigration policies: Regarding issues with immigrants and stuff, I am not completely against it. I think we should be more aware of who and what kind of people we are allowing into our country, to keep everyone safe.

A 15-year-old white female had this to say about Trumps border policies: I just dont understand how that would make us great again. Because America is made up of immigrants, so it wouldnt be America if he didnt allow immigrants.

Teenagers also demonstrated knowledge of the presidents leadership style and background. Many of them mentioned Trumps business portfolio or his extensive Twitter use as a communication tool.

I feel that [Trump] will bring more jobs to the economy since he is a businessman, said a 17-year-old Latina.

On the other hand, youth who disapproved of Trump pointed to his lack of political experience.

Political beliefs varied greatly among adolescents, with many teens expressing strong approval or disapproval of the president in a way that echoed the range of views we see among adult voters.

Trump is going to do many things such as lower taxes, repeal Obamacare and try to institute the travel ban, wrote an 18-year-old white male. He also is not going to be a gun control freak.

A 17-year-old African American female said: I give [Trump] some credit because he is against abortion and gay marriage.

By contrast, a 15-year-old white female from Minnesota wrote: President Trump is a climate change denier. He also is in support of defending the Second Amendment, which I also believe in. However, I also understand that gun violence is rampant in the United States and needs to be regulated more heavily.

The responses we gathered help counter another stereotype about American adolescents: that they are overwhelmingly liberal and likely to vote for Democratic candidates.

Yes, younger generations lean more liberal on some social and political issues compared to older generations. But our study indicates that its inaccurate to generalize about teens political inclinations, because they hold a full range of views.

Teen views of Trump, like those of adults, were strongly related to where they live. Overwhelming majorities of adolescents in Southern California (85%) and Minnesota (84%) disapproved of Trump, but a majority of youth in West Virginia held positive views (66%). Adolescents with more conservative parents were more likely to approve of Trump, while youth from more liberal homes more strongly disapproved of the president. White youth generally held more favorable views of Trump, while females and black and Latino youth tended to reject him.

Our study also helps counter the notion that adolescents are not directly affected by political activity, that they have no skin in the game.

Adolescents in rural West Virginia underlined how Trumps energy policies could directly affect family members employed by power plants or coal mines. This is how one 14-year-old white female put it: I am happy Donald Trump is our president because my dad works for a power company, and that is how we made the majority of our money. Without his job we would have a hard time buying medicines and taking care of everyone in my family.

Many teen Trump skeptics from Southern California noted how his proposed immigration policies could threaten their families or neighborhoods. A 15-year-old Latina, for instance, noted: I am very scared [Trump] will harm my family. My parents are not from this country, but they do the best they can to be here with us and have us live the American dream.

One final theme present in our study highlights issues that will weigh on younger voters in the 2020 election and beyond. A large percentage of responses were framed around issues of racism, sexism and homophobia. Over half of the youth who dismiss Trump viewed his policies as potentially biased or loaded with discriminatory rhetoric, which is consistent with data indicating that younger generations are more attuned to issues of equity.

These concerns were not limited to any one group of teens. For example, an 18-year-old white male from West Virginia said, [Trump] is misogynistic and sexually offensive as audio clips of Donald Trump would prove more than once going as far to make fun of a disabled man in front of national television.

As this response shows, teenagers are more politically informed and opinionated than is usually assumed. This should encourage parents and teachers to engage teens in political discussion and anticipate that they will be able to effectively share informed views.

Additionally, our findings may be interesting to several U.S. districts mulling whether to lower the voting age from 18 to 16.

At very least, this study may help to counter concerns that youth dont care or will arrive at polls uninformed.

[Youre too busy to read everything. We get it. Thats why weve got a weekly newsletter. Sign up for good Sunday reading. ]

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Teenagers reveal what they really think of Donald Trump - The Conversation US

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

At a Fox News Town Hall in front of the Lincoln Memorial on May 3, President Donald Trump revised the US coronavirus death toll, citing a number significantly higher than what hed been predicting just a few weeks ago. I used to say 65,000, and now Im saying 80 or 90, and it goes up and it goes up rapidly, said the president.

Confused about what to make of this? Us too. And with new data and studies about the coronavirus coming out every day, understanding how science and statistics work has never felt more essentialand, lets admit it, overwhelming.

Thats why we brought two people onto the Mother Jones Podcast this week who can help sort through it all, providing tips and tricks for identifying reliable data. Sinduja Rangarajan, a senior data journalist at Mother Jones, has been analyzingdata to show how COVID-19 is infecting Black communities at alarming rates, to highlightwhich communities are the least prepared for the coronavirus, and to forecast when states will run out of hospital beds. Its not always clear what kind of data sources are trustworthy or not, Rangarajan tells host Jamilah King on the Mother Jones Podcast. When Im reporting on these topics, I tend to be skeptical of everything, no matter where that datas coming from, whether its from a city or a state or from universities or nonprofits or think tanks or private companies.

King also talks to Jackie Flynn Mogensen, an assistant editor at Mother Jones, who has been reporting on the medical science of the pandemic, answering key questions on immunity and antibodies and helping us make sense of all those terrifying death projections. Her recent reporting takes a step back and revealsjust how complicated all this science actually isand how, in the frantic rush to get more and more information about the new virus, it can sometimes be untrustworthy or riddled with conflicts of interest. Science isnt about being right. Its the process of becoming less wrong, Mogensen explains on the podcast. What the experts have told me is that making a mistake now, like in the case of ibuprofen, can cost lives.

See the rest here:
Donald Trump Can't Stop Spewing Bad Science. We're Here to Help. - Mother Jones

Kirk is a partisan activist who describes Donald Trump Jr. as a good friend. He presents a 256-page evidence-light rant against the left, institutions, the elite, the establishment and socialists as an argument for the presidents place in history. In his view, the future of the Democrat Party is whiners and killjoys. The future of the Republican Party is winners. After all, he insists, rattling off lists of what he sees as Trumps top accomplishments, Democrats objections to the president are laughable: For many on the left, he absurdly asserts at one point, his association with WWE may be the thing they hate the most. Why, you might ask Kirk, have Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders succeeded in the Democratic primary over their rivals? In part because they resemble Trump a little. That will be news to them.

So what about the doctrine itself? Kirk tries defining it and Trumps thinking a few times, but he cant quite agree with himself even on its back story. In his introduction he writes, The MAGA Doctrine didnt spring into existence in 2016 because it is the core philosophy by which our whole society has come to be over several centuries. A few pages later he writes, it is something new, before, near the end of the book, declaring, The MAGA Doctrine is a jolt to the very organizing principles of the modern world. Got that?

Kirk, at least, has already caught Trumps attention: He earned an approving tweet for the book on its publication day. Good thing, too, or else his description of the president as the greatest defender the Bill of Rights has in modern America and probably the greatest living exemplar of free speech in the 21st century might have been in vain.

THE TODDLER IN CHIEF

What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency

By Daniel W. Drezner

272 pp. University of Chicago Press. Paper, $15.

It is almost surprising that, nearly a third of the way into 2020, more books havent been inspired by viral Twitter threads. Drezners brisk offering is a good place to start, built as it is out of a three-plus year, 1,000-plus tweet project documenting examples of the presidents own aides and allies describing him, in the authors words, like a toddler. A professor of international politics at Tufts Universitys Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Washington Post contributor, Drezner constructs his argument that the president acts like a small child around descriptions of toddlers behavior by the American Academy of Pediatrics. He quotes mainstream news stories from the last four years extensively to highlight Trumps temper tantrums, poor impulse control and oppositional behavior, among other traits.

More here:
Three Views of Donald Trump - The New York Times

Donald Trump is not a supervillain from a comic book. He is a simple man, almost primal in his drives and impulses. For those who choose to see the world as it actually exists, there is no great mystery about what Trump wants: His goal is to be president forever and to use the power of the office to enrich himself and his inner circle, while taking revenge on anyone and everyone who dare to oppose him, or who he thinks has wronged him.

After nearly fouryears of Trump's public contempt for the rule of law, democracy, the Constitutionand norms of human decency, there are still too many Americans especially among the news media and pundit class in a state of denial about thereality of this dire situation.

They have forgotten the wisdom of Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is more likely than not the correct one. This is orders of magnitude true in the case of Donald Trump, very simple man and de facto American emperor.

Seeing opportunity in the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump has repeatedly shownthe American people and the world who he really is.

The most recent example: During a "coronavirus briefing" on Wednesday, Trump threatened to adjourn both houses of Congressa brazen attack on the Constitution and the rule of law unless thatbody surrendered to his will by immediately appointing his handpicked nominees to key government positions.

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In 2017, Yale historian Timothy Snyder,author of the New York Times bestseller"On Tyranny,"warned the public about Trump's obvious plan tousea crisis to suspend democracy andthe Constitution. Here's what he told me then:

Let me make just two points. The first is thatI think it'spretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some elections. I don't think 2018 is looking very good for the Republicans along those conventional lines not just because the president is historically unpopular. It's also because neither the White House nor Congress have any policies which the majority of the public like.

This means they could be seduced by the notion of getting into a new rhythm of politics, one that does not depend upon popular policies and electoral cycles.

Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future.

My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won't work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this and would not necessarily go along.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump declared that he had"total authority" over the country's governors and the individual states they were elected to lead. In making that declaration Trump also threatened to force the country's governors to cease social distancing and other rules put in place to slow down the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. His argument, of course, is that those restrictions are damaging "the economy" and therefore Trump's chances of being re-elected in 2020 (assuminga presidential election even takes place).

After a public outcry Trump walked back his position,sayingthat he will "be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening."

Of course, Trump does not have any such power under America's federal system of government. Such a fact is of little importance: Like other authoritarians, he is testing and breaking political norms so that he can shatter them later.

Such rule-breaking behavior has been an ongoing theme of Trump's rule.

Trump has repeatedly "joked"that he will not leave office, publicly solicited the interference of hostile foreign powers to help him steal the 2020 election, and has threatened the Democratic Party, the news mediaand others who dare to oppose him with imprisonment (orworse) for"treason."

Donald Trump is also trying to defund the U.S.Postal Service, perhaps to preventmail-in voting. Such an outcome will force the American people and Democratic voters most of all to wait in line where they may well be exposed to the coronavirus.Refusing to permitmail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic will clearlysuppress voter turnout, an outcome that will help Trump remain in office. Shutting down the Postal Service will all but guarantee, arguably, that Trump will win asecond term.

Trump has also refusedto send lifesaving ventilators and other much-needed medical equipment to states or localities run by Democrats. Instead, he'sdistributing urgently neededequipment like a dictator or mafia boss, as rewards to his court and other sycophants. In essence, Trump is intentionally hurting and killing those Americans who he deems to be "disloyal" to him and his regime.

In a recent essay forThe Atlantic, Kristy Parker and Yascha Mounk warned that Trump's blatant use of the authoritarian's playbook during the coronavirus crisis will create an opportunity to further undermine American democracy:

Recent history shows that authoritarian populists engage in six categories of assaults on democracy, of which seizing raw executive power is but one. As president, Trump has engaged in each of these behaviors: spreading disinformation, quashing dissent, politicizing independent institutions, amassing executive power, delegitimizing communities, and corrupting elections....

Now, these same tendencies are shaping President Trump's response to the current pandemic. Perhaps the only authoritarian play Trump hasn't yet made is corrupting the upcoming election with the pandemic as an excuse. But we are in the early days of this crisis, and the prospects for him to do so or to abuse his powers in other ways are manifold.

Why do so many members of the news media, the chattering classand the public en masse continue to treat Donald Trump and his threats to democracy and the rule of law as "jokes"performed by an incompetent buffoon who deserves mockery? (Which is truly a waste of energy, since Trump has proven himself to be a malignant narcissist withnosense of shame.)

Moreover, why do so many of these same people still believe that Trump's defeat is somehow inevitable, or that there will definitelybe a presidential election in November?

In a previous essay for Salon, I described these peopleasthe "hope peddlers":

[T]he people whotell the public that everything will be OK, that the danger of the Trump regime has beensomehow exaggerated, that matters are not as dire or extreme as they appearand that a return to "normalcy" is "inevitable" if we somehow muddle through the present moment.

The hope peddlers are so personally, emotionallyand financially invested in "the system" that they are existentially incapable of admitting that Donald Trump and his regime are authoritarians and white neo-fascists who represent an existential threat to the United States of America.

The hope peddlers are also engaged in fantastical thinking where they truly believe that if they repeatedly disseminate narratives about nonexistent Democratic Party victories against Donald Trump's regime, suchvictories will somehow magically appear through sheer force of will.

Some of the other people who cannot admit to themselves (and the public) what and who Donald Trump really is are still stuck in the bargaining and denial stages of grief. Approaching the end of Trump's fourth year in office, such people are lost and may never come to terms with America's horrible reality as failed democracy fully run by neoliberal gangster capitalists, white neo-fascistsand Christian nationalists.

OtherAmericans who arestill stuck in the stages of grief about the age of Trump are behaving like children hiding under the bed from monsters. Children do not yet know that human monsters arereal, and that hiding from them will bring no salvation. Adults have no excuse for engaging in such fallacious thinking.

Then there are others who do not understand the difference between hope and optimism. Activist and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow explained this in a 2016 essay:

Hope is why you tread water if your ship sinks in the open sea: Not because you have any real chance of being picked up, but because everyone who was picked up kicked until the rescue came.

Kicking is a necessary (but insufficient) precondition for survival. There's a special kind of hope: the desperate hope we have for people who are depending upon us. If your ship sinks in open water and your child can't kick for herself, you'll wrap her arms around your neck and kick twice as hard for both of you.

Hope involves taking agency and control over one's own destiny and then taking action to achieve that goal. Optimism is passive. Optimism is also assuming that someone else will do the hard work and that you can be a type of free rider for other people's labor and struggle and sacrifices.

Optimism will not defeat Donald Trump and his authoritarian assault on American democracy and freedom. It is hope made real by the hope warriors which will defeat Donald Trump and his movement.

Donald Trump may not be a supervillain. But defeating him does require that the Fourth Estate and good Americans embrace alternative ways of thinking.

These new guidelines are:

Do not assume that Donald Trump is telling the truth. He has repeatedly shown himself at least 16,000 times to be a habitual liar.

Do not assume that Donald Trump is a decent human being,acting in the best interests of the country. He has repeatedly shown himself to be a corrupt, self-interested person who has no love for the United States and its people.

Do not assume that Donald Trump is an emotionally, intellectually or mentally healthy and normal human being. He has repeatedly shown that he is an obvious malignant narcissist, likely sociopath and apparent cult leader.

Stop assuming that Donald Trump is anything other than what he has shown himself to be. There is no alternate explanation for Trump's evil behavior. Trump is not kidding; Trump means what he says.

The American people in general, and especially the members of the media class,should have learned these rules four years ago, and internalized them. With Election Day 2020 only a few months away, it is almost too late.

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Donald Trump is not a supervillain he just wants to be - Salon