April 6 Open Thread: Trump Under Pressure

Yesterday was not a great day for Trump. He finally cracked and answered a Stormy Daniels question, claiming he didn’t know his lawyer Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 or why. That should pave the way to voiding her non-disclosure agreement. He also made news for fecklessly tossing aside his prepared remarks at a tax roundtable in West Virginia to instead rant about immigrants.

A Dutch journalist got ahold of documents from Shell showing that the oil company knew and warned about global warming back in the 1980s. The internal document warns company officials that it could open Shell up to lawsuits.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s ethical problems make Trump look…well, not unique. But many of them came to light as a result of the Rob Porter abuse scandal. It seems the whistleblower on Porter was a Pruitt aide, and Porter retaliated by spilling the beans on her boss. This is the reason for the expression “Don’t shit where you eat.”

The blue wave might be even bigger than we thought. A new poll from Tennessee shows RWNJ Marsha Blackburn running 10 points behind Democratic former Gov. Phil Bredesen in their Senate race.

The Atlantic caused a stir a couple of weeks ago by hiring right-wing provocateur Kevin Williamson, an asshat who once proposed hanging every woman who’s had an abortion. The outcry wasn’t letting up, so the magazine fired him yesterday. The mainstream media will never learn — these people don’t read, they buy right-wing books to reward the authors. Trying to woo them to mainstream media is a mug’s game.

Kudos to HuffPo, which tracked down the identity of a white nationalist troll who went by “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter. He turns out to be Douglass Mackey, a 28-year-old spoiled rich kid whose father was an aide to GOP Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont. He was outed by someone else on the alt-right as retaliation for something or other. Maybe his swastika pointed the wrong way.