Slate Voice

Rewarding as it is to see a self-dealing mercenary like Paul Manafort—whose previous clients include Mobutu Sese Seko, Ferdinand Marcos, and Jonas Savimbi—face some measure of legal consequences, the guilty plea of Donald Trump’s “fixer” Michael Cohen is, in Trumpworld, the much bigger deal.

On Tuesday, President Trump brushed aside questions about the conviction of his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen. The two cases didn’t matter, said Trump, because they didn’t prove the central charge against him. “This has nothing to do with Russian collusion,” Trump told reporters as he arrived in West Virginia.

David S.

1. Arizona Senate Joe Arpaio’s campaign goes for the murder-suicide against Kelli Ward.With just a week and change left until this final blockbuster Senate primary of the summer, the race has reached its nutty potential. Former state Sen. Kelli Ward and octogenarian former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio have been splitting the conservative opposition to Rep. Martha McSally, with Ward getting the bigger half.

For the past week, former Donald Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has been promoting her new tell-all book with claims that she has heard tapes, recorded on the set of The Apprentice, in which Trump can be heard using the N-word. There is reason to consider Manigault Newman an unreliable narrator, but rumors regarding the existence of these tapes didn’t start, and likely won’t end, with her. Here’s what might happen if such a recording came to light.

Unlike her former mentor, whose inelastic deceptions crumble under the slightest scrutiny, Omarosa Manigault Newman repays close reading. I don’t mean her book (haven’t read it). I mean the publicity tour she’s on, which has twin goals: selling books and carefully dismembering the administration she served until she was fired in January.

The meager turnout at the Unite the Right rally in D.C. on Sunday offered real confirmation that the alt-right’s organizing capabilities have seriously atrophied in the wake of last year’s Charlottesville rally as a consequence of both infighting and resistance. Jason Kessler, an alt-right leader and one of the organizers of both rallies, told the National Park Service that between 100 and 400 demonstrators could be expected to show up in front of the White House.

Asked by a reporter on Wednesday whether he identifies as a socialist, Ben Jealous gave a long-winded but generally on-point response implying he does not. Asked a second time for clarification, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Maryland gave a much shorter response: “Are you fucking kidding me?” You can guess which of the two answers people noticed.

One year ago, a torch-wielding mob chanting “Jews will not replace us” invaded my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. The following day, I was in the streets watching in horror as the modern-day Klan announced itself, flanked by heavily armed soldiers of hate in full fatigues and alt-righters chanting “Heil Trump” while flashing Nazi salutes.

California is burning. More than 15,000 firefighters have been fighting wildfires across the state. As of Monday, the Mendocino Complex fire became the largest in California history. Donald Trump recognized the tragedy by … inaccurately condemning the state’s water policies. This should give us pause, not because of what the president says, but because of the point this marks in Trump’s long, ongoing war with California.

A foreign adversary trying to curry favor with a major American political party. Surreptitious and illegal efforts to influence the election in that party’s favor. A national officeholder and White House staff targeted. A resulting political furor, followed by criminal and congressional investigations. Replace Russia with China, the 2016 election with 1996, and President Donald Trump with Vice President Al Gore, and there are disturbing parallels.

The first rule for improving the historically lackluster voting rate for millennials is to never, ever call them that. That’s just one of the many nuggets in a major new research project that NextGen America, one of billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer’s political organizations, will unveil at a presentation in Washington on Thursday morning. (This is a separate entity from Steyer’s other well-known project, Need to Impeach.

Welcome tothe Hot Seats, Slate’s weekly guide to the seven midterms races that everyone is talking about now. We’re finally in August, an interminable final stretch of primaries and other weird nonsense that rises to national attention when people are bored in the late summer. The last big special election of the cycle will finally take place on Tuesday. It’s tight.

On Sunday, Donald Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow admitted that his client, President Donald Trump, ghostwrote, and instructed his son Donald Trump Jr. to issue, a false statement to the press about an active criminal investigation. Then, after the falsity of Trump Jr.’s statement was uncovered, the president seemingly lied to Sekulow, telling his lawyer that he had played no role in drafting it, and thereby induced Sekulow to repeat that falsehood to the nation.

In 2001, Laura Bush famously departed from her husband’s stance on abortion by saying she thought Roe v. Wade should stand. The first lady was contradicting her president spouse on an issue of great import, and at the time, I thought it was a gutsy move that could have a positive impact on GOP abortion politics.

Twenty-five years ago, student wrestlers at Ohio State University thought their assistant coach, Jim Jordan, was a stand-up guy. Now they’re learning the hard way that he isn’t. A report published on Wednesday by NBC News adds to the case against Jordan: He’s orchestrating a campaign to cover up what he and other coaches knew about sexual abuse at OSU. The man at the center of Wednesday’s story is Dunyasha Yetts, who wrestled for OSU in 1993 and 1994.

President Trump’s new lawyer has a warning about President Trump’s old lawyer: Don’t trust him. According to CNN and NBC News, Donald Trump’s previous lawyer, Michael Cohen, has said he’s prepared to tell investigators that in June of 2016, he witnessed Donald Trump Jr. tell Trump about a Russian offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton. The offer led to the now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower, which Trump claims to have known nothing about.

Did President Trump ask FBI Director James Comey, in a February 2017 meeting, not to pursue a Trump adviser who had misled investigators about conversations with Russians? If Trump made that request, it could be evidence of obstruction of justice, particularly in light of Comey’s subsequent firing. Trump denies it, but Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, seems to think that it may have happened.

Who knows what was going through President Trump’s head when he tweeted out an all-caps threat at Iranian President Hassan Rouhani earlier this week. Perhaps even the president himself doesn’t know. It is possible that Trump has visions of regime change in his mind. Or he may be looking to repeat his North Korea gambit: a self-inflicted crisis followed by a theatrical summit that allows him to assume the mantle of statesman. Either of these scenarios could come to pass.

Given an administration this adept at manufacturing crises, it can be easy to stack scandals until you lose sight of the real problems that need solving. This is the risk of “Russiagate.” The Trump campaign’s Russia connections are probably a scandal, and the attacks on the election are undoubtedly a crisis. But there’s a caveat: Russia’s conduct, formidably strategic though it seems to have been, wouldn’t have worked without American susceptibility.