Not Just Another Week in Washington

First Read: “If you turn on your TV news, scroll through your newspapers and thumb through your tweets, this might seem like just another normal week in the Trump Era. The president’s former lawyer/fixer was sentenced to three years in jail; Trump got rid of his chief of staff but has no replacement lined up; and the government appears hurtling toward a possible partial government shutdown. Boring. Ho-hum. Same old, same old.”

“But let’s snap out of it. It’s a HUGE deal that another person close to the president or his 2016 campaign was sentenced/indicted/pleaded guilty for wrongdoings. It’s a HUGE deal that there’s so much internal chaos in the White House that it’s too much for a four-star general, and that the odds-on favorite to replace him as chief of staff didn’t want the job. It’s a HUGE deal that the president has threatened to shut down the government if he doesn’t get his border wall.”

“And it’s a HUGE deal that the president of the United States has been identified as Individual-1 in prosecutors’ legal filings.”

“We get the temptation of how these stories can become numbing – to the public, to the journalists covering them, and to Washington at large. But remember, any of these stories this week would be a five-alarm political fire for any other presidency.”