Aug. 25 Open Thread: Gravedancers’ Ball

Frank Rich reminds us that the premature end of a crooked presidency happens, as Hemingway wrote of bankruptcy, gradually and then suddenly. He’s not the only pundit who took the opportunity of Trump’s worst week to look ahead to how his presidency will end. Eliot Cohen claims tyrants, unloved, are always abandoned by their followers. Gail Collins, playing a network executive, offers recasting suggestions to make The Trump Show more believable. Only Robert Reich predicts Trump will survive until 2020, and might even win re-election.

Paging Gus Fring: Borders agents in Arizona found a drug-smuggling tunnel under the border that emerged in the U.S. inside an abandoned KFC outlet about 200 yards from the border.

Officials in North Carolina are going all-out to defend the Confederate memorial statue that was pulled down this week, charging three people who remain unnamed. This proves that a statue of a white person has more rights than a living black person in North Carolina.

The heat-stress death of a University of Maryland football player shows that football has problems that stretch beyond the NFL. Sally Jenkins notes that the NCAA has no rules protecting players from bullet-headed coaches who think heat stress builds character. In the 17 years since NFL player Korey Stringer’s death, no NFL player has succumbed, but 27 college players have died in pre- or off-season workouts.