January 11, 2018

“Close advisers and friends of President Trump are warning him not to sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, with some expressing skepticism that there would be any circumstance in which it makes sense to voluntarily submit to an interview,” CNN reports.

“Mueller hasn’t yet requested a Trump interview but has indicated he wants to talk with the President.”

“Nearly a year into her tenure as first lady — and after a week of intense scrutiny prompted by a new book that claims she had dreaded life in the White House — Melania Trump has hired a director of policy to advance her nascent platform,” the New York Times reports.

“For months, Mrs. Trump’s East Wing had searched for a policy director who could further an agenda that has been broadly defined as helping children.”

Jon Meacham: “Almost certainly, but we live in a world in which the outlandish (a President Trump) became a reality, so who’s to say where our political melodrama will end? It’s highly unlikely, but this unprecedented presidency could lead to unprecedented constitutional ground: the invocation of the boring-sounding yet world-shaking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.”

“We know, we know: it all sounds over­heated, particularly when you consider that Vice President Mike Pence is one of Trump’s chief enablers and that the Cabinet officers all owe their place to Trump, whom they would be voting to humiliate. And yet the mechanics are in place, and the history of the question of presidential incapacity, and of the amendment itself, shows that lawmakers at midcentury anticipated a President whose instability might amount to disability. So why pass up a teachable moment to explore remote constitutional hypotheticals?”