If I can be a little crude, if we remember the drip, drip, drip of the Lewinsky scandal culminated in the blue dress, right. Yeah and so then all of a sudden, Clinton’s lie was exposed, et cetera. Trump runs around in public wearing the blue dress like there’s no drip, drip, drip. His corruption is just right there. I’m Michelle Cottle, I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion, and I am here today with my fantastic colleagues, columnists David French and Jamelle Bouie. Hello, friends, and welcome back from the Labor Day weekend, which sadly signals kind of the last legs of summer. Hello, Michelle. Hey, Michelle. And now, being newly in Chicago, the last legs of summer hit harder, I think. Oh, this will be your first cold season coming up in Chicago. That is fantastic. Washington, it doesn’t get cold here for a long time still, but I do love fall with all the kids walking back to school in my neighborhood. They’re not being escorted by the National Guard yet, but I’m going to give it a couple more weeks. Jamelle, are you ready? Are you ready for this? Yeah I mean, my kids are back in school. We started school a little earlier here in Virginia, and so it’s like, it feels like the fall already. It’s been cooler too. So there you go. Well, this week I think we’re going to tackle one of my very favorite subjects, which is Congress. They’re back from their time off. And they are all geared up to defend our democracy or not. Well, however they however they choose to roll on the docket, they have a lot to do. It’s a huge to do list. There is government funding, a possible government shutdown, a bill that would force the White House to release everything it knows about Jeffrey Epstein. And then the bigger question that is always looming amid Trump’s bulldozing of checks and balances. Does Congress even have any power anymore. Which I think we’re going to get into a lot. So I want to start with federal funding, because this is the big kind of ugly fight we’ve got coming up. The government is only funded through the end of this month. So, they got maybe two weeks to get this done. There are, of course, all the usual rumblings about a government shutdown, but the chance of that happening is never zero, especially with the sour mood in Congress and a heavy handed Trump administration making things all the more complicated So with the upcoming battle, what are you guys hoping for. What’s making you really nervous. Jamelle, you want to go first. Sure, I’ll go first. I think Democrats should let the government shutdown. I think yeah, I’m 100 percent pro shut down. Not because I think it’d be good a government shutdown is bad, but because the administration has shown basically its total contempt for the idea of Congress having power over the purse. The administration has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to either avoid spending money that Congress has appropriated to treat all appropriations from Congress as little more than recommendations for whatever the president wants to do. And frankly, if there is no guarantee that the White House is going to adhere to congressional appropriations, which I got to remind everyone, Congress gets Article I in the Constitution and Congress has power of the purse is like its most important power. It’s really the whole ballgame. So if the administration is just not going to take seriously what Congress says it ought to spend, I think that the best option is basically to say, listen, shut down the government until we can get guarantees that the White House is going to obey the law. David? Yeah, I don’t think ransom shutdowns work. So, for example, if you go back to the early Tea Party era and you remember the Ted Cruz initiated, initiated government shutdown, that was – Green eggs and ham, my friend. Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them. Sam-I-am I do not like green eggs and ham. That was really designed. One of the goals was, O.K, we’re going to shut down the government to hold up the Obama administration, to repeal, defund, do something about Obamacare. That a did not absolutely did not work. And B, it is very debatable often how these things work out. The people get mad about government shutdowns and they don’t always blame the party that we want them to blame. When it comes to a shutdown. Although I do understand absolutely, totally, positively understand the impulse to shut down because there are so few things that an opposition party can do when they don’t control Congress. And one of them, one of the things they can do is a filibuster. And so I feel like when you are in the opposition, when you don’t have the House, when you don’t have the Senate, you’re really often grasping at straws. And you have a lot of the public out there saying, fight, fight, fight, do more to fight. But your tools are so limited when you’re in the Congressional minority. And so I understand the impulse. I just don’t think it always works out, or I don’t know that it is ever quite worked out the way the architects of a shutdown have wanted to do it. And so I would be against I don’t see the upside to it. I see a lot of additional chaos, and I’m very leery about creating more power vacuums that Trump can fill. So consider me to be in against category. Two quick observations. The first is, I think I’m not sure one can draw an analogy between this shutdown and the 2013 shutdown with Cruz or any of the Gingrich ones, in part because the demand here isn’t that Trump repeal the big beautiful bill, right. It’s not a demand for the administration to back off any of its lawful priorities. It’s a demand to follow the law, to treat congressional appropriations as the law. If we’re going to give you votes to pass a continuing resolution to continue funding the funding, the government and we’re going to negotiate things right, we’re going to negotiate things that we want to see. And then you’re just going to treat this as a recommendation that you can blow off. It’s like, what’s the point. It’s like it’s Lucy, it’s Lucy holding the football. It’s Charlie Brown trying to kick it. It’s just they’re going to pull it away. And I do think that in this case, because it’s not so much the Democrats need to filibuster anything. It’s just like, I mean, Republicans have the majority Republicans figure it out, figure out a budget, and if they need Democratic votes, then they guarantee they have to give is the president doesn’t ignore the appropriation. And if they can give, if they can make that guarantee and act on it, then I think Democrats please fund the government. But if there’s not going to be any kind of reciprocity here, if it’s just going to be you’re going to give us the votes and then we’re going to we’ll do whatever we want. And I just don’t think that Democrats should engage in that just for the sake of for the sake of Congress’s own powers, if nothing else. So, David. Yeah how do you how do you view the whole issue with the complete disregard for checks and balances that the Trump administration has. Kind of I mean, I absolutely hear what Jamelle saying I would be. I would feel more comfortable with his recommendation if I believed that a guarantee from Trump and his mini mes in Congress meant anything. I would feel that a Trump guarantee would have exactly as much weight as a Putin guarantee. And so I think even if you ended up with guarantees, Trump’s still going to do what he wants to do. And the only thing that is going to stop him is either acts of Congress that are so crystal clear that they’re going to be backed up by the Supreme Court of the United States, or quite frankly, electoral losses in the midterms. And even then, so long as he is president of the United States, I’m very I have a lot of questions as to what can will realistically be done that he would view as binding him. But by those standards, there’s no good option. You fund it and he’s going to blow it up. You don’t fund it and he’s going to blow it up. So at that point then I think Democrats are weighing kind of people’s response to how they handle this. And I am quite certain that Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate is remembering just how much abuse he has taken over letting the last funding measures go through. Like in part, Jamelle has mentioned the fight. I think a lot of Democrats and a lot of Trump skeptical folks are a little bit concerned about just the Democratic resistance lying down or the Democratic opposition lying down and saying, sure, just come on through. So is there an argument that the fight in itself is worth something. I mean, O.K, but you’re going to hurt regular people. That is why people don’t like government shutdowns, and then they go and blame somebody for it. And if you’re going to be podcasting because you have a base that is a minority of America that is saying fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, or you better do something and then you do something that doesn’t actually change. Trump and hurts regular people. That strikes me as an unwise decision. The problem is the fight, fight, fight instinct has to be channeled in a way. I would say that is a not going to hurt regular people would be one very big component of fight, fight, fight. Don’t hurt regular innocent people. And number two, do it in a way in which there isn’t a very high likelihood that you’re going to receive the blowback for the action. And I feel like it’s déjà vu all over again. There’s this fight was in the Republican side throughout much of Obama’s two terms. In the government shutdown throughout in the Clinton era. And there was this constant refrain of we got to do something, we’re going to shut down the government, at least that on the Republican side. There were those who could turn around and say, well, look, this is consistent with our more limited government ethos. We want to pare back the federal government anyway. But I’m very leery of a fight, fight, fight that will hurt regular folks. So, I mean, David’s point is, spot on in terms of this is the reason shutdowns are so unpopular because they do hurt people. How much are you worried about blowback. So if the path towards a shutdown were a Democratic filibuster, I think, there might be like real concerns about blowback. But if a path towards a shutdown is just Democrats saying, we’re going to let you guys have the majority, you have the majority in Congress, you have the White House. We’ll let you figure out a budget deal. We’re just not going to participate. I don’t think there’s blowback there. I really don’t, because in that situation. It’s Republicans who wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get things done. It’s not. Democrats are under no obligation to fix Republicans’ problems for them. And this is going to sound callous. But there’s an extent to which I think that maybe voters ought to feel some pain if the Republican Party cannot get it together enough to pass a continuing resolution. I think one of the dynamics over the past decade of America, past 15 years of American politics, has been a profoundly irresponsible Republican Party, a Republican Party that has almost completely abdicated any serious attempt to govern the country, and then being bailed out by a Democratic Party that feels rightfully, I suppose, an obligation to govern the country. And the effect of that, in terms of what the message it sends to the public, is that there are no costs involved in electing anti-government maniacs, there are no costs that you can elect them in an effective way. I want to express my anger and disdain at the system, knowing that the other side is going to feel some responsibility to make sure things don’t get too out of hand. But what if you just let them get too out of hand. What if you say what. This is what you voted for. This is what you wanted and this is what you’re going to get. And don’t try to bail out the Republican Party from its dysfunction and its inability to govern. Will that hurt regular people. Yes it will. Does sometimes in the same way that sometimes your kid has to fall off their bike to learn how to ride it better. Does the public need to touch the stove, to borrow a phrase that went around earlier this year in order to figure out not to put these people back in the office. I think so. Well, I think we might be talking past each other here a little bit because if the statement is just Democrats don’t vote for a Republican budget and you’re in the minority, and the Republicans who have a majority can pass it, and you’re not filibustering anything that you can filibuster. To me, that’s not a you’re not engineering a government shutdown. That would be a Chip Roy, Thomas Massie-style shutdown, if three or four Republicans, enough of Republicans in the House dissented from the party line. And to me, that’s a very different thing. That’s and that’s what we’re talking about here. That’s the envisioned scenario, not so much that there’d be a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, but simply that Republicans, because of the Massie and Chip Roy and all those guys up there, is Republican leadership is like, we’re going to need Democratic votes to do this. And so I think Democrats just shouldn’t give them the votes. Just say what. I think the outcome is going to be that they won’t need Democratic votes that they’ll allow one or two, one or two get to stand up in front of their constituents and say, look how independent I am. But I simply not voting for Republican budget resolution when you’re in the minority to me, is not engineering a government shutdown. Well, it also just got made more complicated last week because President Trump announced that he’s going to be pursuing the path of pocket rescissions, which basically is his way of unilaterally clawing back congressional funding. And in this case, it would be like around $5 billion in foreign aid, which even Republicans who would be happy to cut that money are a little bit nonplussed about the fact that this is just blatant slap at Congress and just has no respect for the idea of as Jamal’s talking about the power of the purse and what it does is it makes it that much harder for the Senate leader, John Thune, to get Democratic votes for any kind of bipartisan bill for funding the government. Everybody on both sides are pretty they’re pretty confident that this has just made their fall that much uglier. So well, here’s one of the things that’s also on the docket that is a little bit more complicated, especially because there are a couple of Republicans who’ve thrown in with the Democrats on this, which is the Epstein files. So the House Oversight Committee has already released files from the Justice Department’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. But it’s not like this was some big reveal. Most of these documents had already been out there. And especially kind of the conspiracy fans on the MAGA side would love to see what is being hidden. And so Trump has done everything possible to distract from this. And yet we see Thomas Massie, Congressman from Kentucky one of Trump’s chief antagonists in his own party. Not that there are very many out there this week hosting a press conference with Epstein’s victims. So I wanted to get your take on if you think this is going to continue to be enough of a problem that it’s something the White House has to further deal with. I mean, I think so you can’t explicitly run. I think we’ve discussed this before. You can’t explicitly run on we’re going to release the Epstein files. And then when you’re there, be on second thought, we don’t want to anymore. On second thought, we’re not going to do it. Like, that is the most straightforward violation of a promise you can possibly imagine. And the fact that this isn’t just. This isn’t like shadows. This is a real thing. Like Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, the victims had had Nancy Mace, the Republican Congresswoman, in tears. But there are hundreds, literally hundreds more victims beyond those that testified. There is all these unanswered questions about the president’s relationship with Epstein previously. I mean, this is going to be a thing the White House is going to have to deal with. It cannot it cannot wave this away or distract this away. They can try to instigate a war with Venezuela, which they’re doing. And this will still be something they have to account for. I stand by the way I assess this at the beginning, which is this is a bit of a problem for Trump, but he’s still going to keep his hold. But what’s really interesting about Epstein to me is, what does this mean for MAGA more broadly. Because all of the conversation right now, and it’s super understandable because we’re less than a year in to this second term, gosh, less than a year in to the second term. Let’s just say that again. Stop that all of the conversation, or 90 percent of it is really focused on what does this mean for Donald Trump. And I’m of the opinion that, look, we’ve been through this about what every scandal that arises. So far doesn’t dent Trump with the Republican base, including January 6, including in the days right after January 6. McConnell’s approval rating plummeted and Pence’s approval rating plummeted with Republicans and not Trump’s. But I think what’s really interesting about this is the divisions that’s exposing in MAGA. And we’ve seen a lot of divisions arising in MAGA in the last two to three months. Do you bomb Iran? Do you not bomb Iran? So I’m very interested about what the Epstein files represent going forward. As far as what is MAGA. What is this thing after Donald Trump is gone. Because it looks to me like you have unity around Trump, but you have disunity just spreading across the rest of the Republican coalition on multiple important fronts. And I think Trump has kind of kept the lid on this coalition and that when Trump is gone and you lift the lid, it is anybody’s ball game at that point as to which faction emerges. How much can this bag of scorpions stay together. And I think the Epstein incident is a leading edge indicator of that. So in terms of damage enduring damage, is it worse if the files come out. Obviously we don’t know what’s in them. Like if there was something like that blew up, that would be one thing. Or if they continue to hide them and feed that suspicion that they used and exploited so well for so many years. But like considering that there is a chunk of magma that just kind of is fueled by conspiracy paranoia, would it be worse if they continued to have to wonder I mean, this is all assuming that it’s not in there that Trump did something truly, illegal and appalling. But I mean, that’s the thing. There’s something in there, then I mean, obviously that’s obviously that’s the thing that’s more damaging. But even then, I feel like in the history of American scandals, it’s worse for it to be a steady drip, right. I mean, that’s honestly kind of Trump’s. Trump’s ability to withstand scandal has a lot to do with the fact that it’s never been a steady drip. It’s always been right in your face. He’s always been quite unapologetic about it. And that kind of short circuits not just the public response, public’s response to scandal, but also the press’s response to scandal where there isn’t a story to follow over time. But just like one thing. And even if it isn’t dislodging Trump’s base from him, it is certainly harming his approval with the rest of the country. And I find myself saying it’s important to remember that Trump lost about half the voting public in last year’s election. Started off his administration relatively unpopular for a new president, and has only dipped below that since then. And although Trump may not believe that he has to maintain any particular standing with the public, I think it is true that the worse they perform with the overall public, just the weaker their position. Their position is. And he’s a very special boy. But his congressional members are not necessarily right. And how much of a problem is it for Congress that they’ve just basically except for a handful of members on the Republican side, they’ve just basically lay down in the street and they’re like yeah, just we’ll take whatever kind of nonsense you’re going to spout about this, and we’re not going to demand anything, even after years of you saying Oh, I’m going to release everything that’s got to make Congress that cannot reflect well on the Congress. You raise a great point. And that is MAGA is making a huge mistake if it thinks that it and all of its members are as Teflon as Donald Trump is. Because what we have seen time and time and time again is that when the primary when primaries produce MAGA candidates in swing states, and when I say MAGA candidate, I mean somebody who’s all in on Trumpism doesn’t have much Normie Republican in them at all. The record there is pretty grim. But one other thing you said, Michelle, that’s so, I think, so important. And Jamelle, you said it. Jamelle said it. That drip, drip, drip. As Jamelle was saying, is really, really important for people understanding that something is a problem, it’s bad. It takes a while for it to seep into the system. And then if the drip, drip, drip is followed by a big reveal, that’s the most catastrophic kind of scandal. But what Trump does, I mean, if I can be a little crude, if we remember the drip, drip, drip of the Lewinsky scandal culminated in the blue dress, right. Yeah and so then all of a sudden, Clinton’s lie was exposed, et cetera. Trump runs around in public wearing the blue dress like there’s no drip, drip, drip. His corruption is just right there. It is just out there. And I think that there is this interesting thing where the public, it’s like if they’re not trying to hide it, it doesn’t feel corrupt to people. Does that make sense. In other words, it’s like reality TV on some level. I just think that he operates on such different with such different standards and people are like, Oh, it’s just Trump, playing a role. I think that’s right. I don’t think it’s just the public. I think it’s the press, too. I honestly think that Trump being so openly corrupt, basically recalibrates everyone’s expectations about what is normal behavior. And so this is not Epstein, but right. Like the Trump family has made like six billion, $5 billion on some crypto coin. And it’s like that’s so wildly corrupt corrupt, doesn’t even feel like the right word for it. Yeah, but everybody just nods. But everyone’s like, Oh Yeah Yeah. Trump has crypto right. And it just it recalibrates expectations in part of it is that Trump himself does not behave as if he has anything to hide. And Epstein is the one time where he is acting as if he has something to hide. They all look very shifty. But all of this speaks again to what we were talking about which is that Congress has basically just abdicated another area of its responsibility, which is accountability for the executive branch. Can I ask y’all a question? This is a question I’ve been asking myself. Should we cover Congress less? And here’s what it doesn’t matter anymore. Correct. So how many resources do you think the typical large scale media operation dedicates to covering Congress versus the courts? Which would one of those two branches is actually doing work more that’s more relevant to people? It’s the courts. It’s the courts right now. I fear that all a lot of the attention we’re pouring into Congress is fueling congressional dysfunction in this sense that a lot of those guys are now being elected and they view their job as I’m just a pundit. I’m a spokesperson for the cause. Yeah and so 130 percent I just talked to a bunch of senators who were. And it’s not even the way it used to be where you’ve got a basic kind of timeline where you’re performing over weeks or months. It’s like they’re operating on a social media quick hits. They’re going to have, two seconds of Fame on this and three seconds on that, and they’re going to get a beat down on Twitter if they don’t. It’s insane. And they’re all excruciatingly aware of it. I see your point, David. I think that every mainstream media organization could stop covering Congress the way it has. And this would still be a problem, in part because for Republicans at least, that’s not the media ecosystem they necessarily care about. The media. It’s Fox. OAN. Twitter, it’s Twitter. It’s all of that is the podcasters, it’s the yeah, it’s the ability to parlay. Some notoriety as a Congressman into a podcast for you sell like brain supplements. Michelle, you said you said earlier, just a minute ago that Congress isn’t even doing its role providing accountability. And this might feel a little esoteric, but I even I increasingly feel that language about Congress is itself reflective of part of our larger problem when it comes to Congress, which is that in the constitutional text, Congress’s job isn’t to provide accountability for the executive branch, it’s to lead the government like that’s Congress’s job. Congress and I think in a fair reading of the text, is the leading branch of the government. And arguably, it is the job of the court and of the executive to bound in Congress somewhat by design. Congress can do all these things. And there’s been some interesting scholarship on notions of what enumerated power is and what that’s inclusive of and whether, in fact, that Congress by the text has a much broader set of powers than even we traditionally understand. And the text suggests that Congress is just as dominant and domineering institution that itself has to be bound in by other actors. But we not just because of Trump, but for the last half century, have existed in a world where it’s the president that leads the government. And yet Congress exists to put limits on executive authority. And I think Congress people have internalized that idea as well, that their job is not so much to lead the nation, but to be kind of like a support position for the executive branch. And so all of that has left us with a situation where you have a Congress right now that because it sees itself in a support role, has effectively like dissolved itself for all intents and purposes and has abdicated most of its authority to the presidency. And there doesn’t appear to me to be any countervailing force. Like nerds like me will complain about it. But can anyone imagine a future Congress that says to itself, irrespective of who the president is, we have all this power and we want to use it. We have all these resources to become, individual members can learn a great deal. And we’re not that far removed from a time when individual members weren’t just doing TV hits, but were actual experts on actual issues and capable of writing complicated and complex legislation. Are we ever going to get to a point where members of Congress, the typical member of Congress, sees themselves as someone doing an actual job that requires expertise that they’re going to build versus where we are now, where it’s yeah, we’re just junior partners to whoever’s in the White House. To be very clear, I am not at all saying don’t cover Congress, but I’m saying the we have a massive imbalance right now. You can have a member of Congress who’s walking through the halls of Capitol Hill, and they got a gaggle around them of media. And yet, if I was going to describe to an average American who is more powerful, who has more influence over your life, is it one of these cast of congressional characters, or is it the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit court of Appeals. It’s the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals by 5,000 miles, and nobody knows who that is, O.K. And so what we’re doing with the following, these people around hanging on their every word, listening to them, writing news stories about their stupid posts is that we are contributing to it. I’ve reached a point like, I’m not even exaggerating let’s say I’m at dinner her and I meet a bunch of people and from different walks of life. One person is an accountant, one person’s a lawyer, somebody’s a construction worker, somebody, you name it. And one of the people in the introduces themselves. I’m a member of Congress, Republican member of Congress from your district. He is immediately the least interesting person to me at the table. I’m not joking. Like, that sounds weird. That is so harsh. He’s the least interesting person, because I’m looking at somebody who, in many ways, is a nonentity as a separate human professional being. They are an extension of somebody else. That’s Donald Trump. So, Jamelle, you were talking about the power that they used to have and that they haven’t wielded in decades. This is not all about Donald Trump. So I always like to point out that this was a big crusade for someone who has studied this in the Senate a great deal over the years, whose father used to argue before the Supreme Court all the time, and that is Senator Mike Lee. Senator Mike Lee had an Article I crusade right before the 2016 election because he saw Hillary Clinton coming to some degree, and he was trying to scare his Republican colleagues into clawing back. Now, I have made very clear over the years that Mike Lee has been a big disappointment in terms of his just complete giving up and bowing before Trump. I mean, he’s a crank now. He is someone who when you mention his name, people roll their eyes because whatever he stood for, he has essentially put that on the back burner to keep Trump happy. But yes, there tend to be occasional members that pop up and want to do this, but then it kind of runs counter to their partisan interests and they’ll abandon it. I don’t think it’s going to be something that comes from individual members. It has to be like a sea change in attitudes within an entire political party. It has to be the partisan project of a political party. And I can envision a pathway to it. One of the stories of This administration is just like the destruction of the administrative state and the gutting of the federal bureaucracy, it’s simply the case that liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call them, have a vested interest in rebuilding the administrative state and rebuilding the federal bureaucracy. And that might encourage some creative thinking about the role of Congress in reconstituting both of those things. And that’s not something that can really come from the executive branch, it has to come from Congress. I’m 100 percent in agreement with Jamelle. Individual members of the Senate, for example, are not going to be able to shift the course of this train. What I’m afraid of is that we’re going to have a situation where the natural consequences of this administration’s policies and Congress’s abdication of its authority are going to play out in ways that ultimately end up being profoundly negative for the United States of America. And in the resulting blowback, you’re going to have an opportunity for Congress institutionally to rediscover itself because this very close 50-50, 51-49, 49-51 arrangement is not the norm throughout American history. We go through periods where we do have this close, these close divisions, but then usually the logjam is broken and one party will be the dominant party for a generation or more. I mean, we have seen this happen. Think after Watergate, after Watergate and the Nixon imperial presidency, you had, for a very brief period of time, a lot of congressional reforms hemming the hymning the president back in, a logjam was broken and you had some real reform. And so I think one Ise we have to have part of ourselves absolutely focused on containing the constitutional damage that Trump is doing. But another he has broken so many things that there is going to be a rebuild task. How do you rebuild? What is the vision for rebuilding? And I would say if the vision for rebuilding doesn’t involve structural reforms to revive Congress, we’re just going to be doing a repeat play of this awful tragedy that we’ve been enduring again and again and again. O.K, so we’ve got a waste no crisis philosophy here. I like this everybody. Everybody agrees it’s going to have to it’s going to have to do something bigger than what we’ve been looking at. I don’t want to leave everybody on a despondent, despairing note. So before we go, I want you guys to bring us all back from the holiday and roll us into the kind of encroaching fall with a recommendation. Give us something that you’re enjoying right now that you want people you want to share with people out there. Sure it’s where I live. It’s fall festival season. It’s officially started. We went to one the family on this past weekend. They had sunflowers pick. They had an Apple cannon like a cannon to shoot apples out of. That was pretty cool. And I’m just going to recommend that people go to fall festivals at nearby farms or whatever. They’re good fun. Nice way to spend. Usually a Saturday or Sunday outside. Nice weather, enjoying the company of other people, and hopefully there’s some kind of gun that shoots fruit, which is pretty cool. I went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival a couple of weeks ago and it was. It was magic, but there was no fruit being shot. Yeah, this was great. It was. It was an actual cannon with, sights, and you put an apple in it and shoot it and the velocity was quite intense. I definitely spent 20 bucks and a lot of time shooting apples at a rusty car. O.K David? David so that’s a great recommendation. My recommendation involves not getting off your couch because it is streaming and it is foundation on Apple TV. Season 3 came out, but it is based on Isaac, loosely based on Isaac Asimov’s books, classic science fiction books set very far in the future. And the basic storyline is a mathematician, using extremely advanced mathematical techniques, has been able to predict the future course of the Galaxy, and he is predicting the fall of the empire, the Galactic Empire, and horrific chaos darkness awfulness as it falls. And so close to reality. I’m sorry. No, it is close to reality. Except there’s some interesting. Yeah, you can see echoes, but it’s true sci-fi. But anyway, the he forms a foundation, hence the name foundation. It was a collection of people. And their mission is to shorten the darkness. If they can’t stop the fall of the empire, what they need to do is make the empire’s fall less horrific. And the inter and the period of anarchy and chaos shorter. So they want to shorten the darkness. And I’ve often thought of that in connection with how do you respond to this Trump era. We can’t stop the darkness. He won. But you can shorten the darkness. And so it’s a lot of fun. So I’m going to go off and recommend a little weird reading, which is “I Was a Teenage Slasher,” and I’m just going to come right out and say that as the summer comes to an end, I’m loathe to give up my kind of trashy beach reading. And this is kind of a comedy horror book about it plays off like movies like “Cabin in the Woods” or “Scream” that get at the tropes of horror movies, except the narrator is basically turning into a slasher. And so for those of you who need a little escape, I recommend picking it up incredibly fast. Fun read. So, O.K, well, I think that’s it, guys. As always, Thank you very much. We’ll do this again with whatever hell comes down the pike next week. Always a pleasure. Thanks, Jamelle. Thanks, Michelle.
Opinion | Three Opinion Writers on Whether Congress Can Rein in Trump
