July 31 Open Thread: Democrats Have a Billionaire Sugar Daddy

To hear the conservative unwashed tell it, George Soros is the sugar daddy for everything from Nazis to Commies to — worst of all — Democrats. In reality, the party has its own super-donor to rival the GOP’s Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and the Mercer family. You probably have heard of Tom Steyer as the guy who keeps pushing Democrats to impeach Trump, but his efforts go far beyond that. Like the Kochs on the right, Steyer has formed his own political operations that together have about 1,000 people on the payroll, and his concerns do not align with the overly cautious Democratic leadership.

Murray Waas in the New York Review of Books has seen what he calls the most damning evidence yet that Trump knew all about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. This is apparently part of the reason both Trump and Rudy lapsed into incoherent panic mode the past few days. Giuliana even spilled the beans on a pre-Trump Tower meeting meeting, apparently because Mueller already knows about it and one news organization or another was preparing to publish a story about it.

Vanity Fair’s takes on the Trump interregnum always play up the petty backstabbing he surrounds himself with, and this peek behind the curtains, supposedly focused on his re-election campaign, contains plenty of that for those who take comfort in the fact that whatever else Trump is, he ain’t happy.