Swamp Things

“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility. I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.” The outgoing head of the Office of Government Ethics is worried.

+ Meanwhile, President Trump continues to argue that most politicians would have taken the meeting with the Russians, and tweeted that “Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?” (You know, he has a point. Why didn’t the media cover the Hillary email story? If they had, she might have lost the election.)

+ “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life,” he said. “The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.” The New Yorker’s Peter Hessler on how Trump is transforming rural America.