When the FBI announced in October 2016 that it was reviewing new emails related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server as secretary of state, it gave Donald Trump a priceless gift. Not because, as it turned out, Clinton had deliberately mishandled classified information or was about to be charged with a crime, but because it gave the impression of impropriety, which the reality-TV host rode all the way to the White House. Unfortunately for Trump, whose polling couldn’t be worse, we are living in the year 2020 and he is running against Joe Biden, not Hillary Clinton. These are the sort of simple questions a doctor might ask a patient to assess whether they’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury, yet, weirdly, it appears that neither the president nor his employees know the correct answers.

Speaking to Fox News on Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Dana Perino, “We’ve got the emails. We’re getting them out. We’re gonna get all this information out so the American people can see it. You’ll remember there was classified information on a private server, should have never been there. Hillary Clinton should never have done that. It was unacceptable behavior. It’s not the kind of thing that leaders do.... Classified information needs to stay on the right places. Secretary Clinton, when she was here at the State Department, did not do that.... We’ll get the information out that needs to get out…as fast as we can. I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”

The news that the federal government is working on releasing Clinton’s emails “as fast” as it can, as though there are no other pressing issues to deal with, comes one day after Trump called in to Fox Business to rant about the fact that his former opponent hasn’t been “indicted” (which may have something to do with the fact that she was cleared of wrongdoing), saying that he was “not happy” with Pompeo for failing to get her emails out to the public. (He also complained that his attorney general hasn’t indicted Biden and Barack Obama, saying that Bill Barr will go down in history “as a very sad, sad situation” if he fails to prosecute the president’s enemies.)

In a sign of how utterly bizarre it is that Trump is screaming about Clinton’s emails and thinks releasing them might help his reelection chances, even some of the gang at Fox Business have wondered why he thinks voters care about any of this. “President Trump didn’t follow what the Wall Street Journal was saying in terms of staying on policy,” anchor Dagen McDowell said following the interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I am not sure it helped his campaign to talk about Hillary Clinton’s emails and going back down that rabbit hole like it was four years ago.... It was kind of, well, all over the place. It didn’t really focus on the very issues of what the American people want to hear. Some of it did, but some of it clearly did not.”

Anyway, it’s not clear what the president plans to do with his time should he lose in November and actually vacate the White House, but if he does and those close to him finally get him the help he needs, the odds are pretty high he’ll still regularly be calling in to Fox in 2024 claiming he’s got classified information about Clinton “that’s going to shock voters like you wouldn’t believe.” Then he’ll whisper, “I gotta go, they’re here” while an orderly’s key turns in the lock, adding, “The DOJ doesn’t want you to know this because it’s part of the deep state, but her husband had an affair with an intern. It’s all there in the documents.” Then the phone will drop and we’ll hear him yell ”Stay back! Keep your hands off of me! Presidential harassment!”

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And speaking of Trump’s mental faculties…

Nancy Pelosi is supporting a bill that would create a panel to assess if the president is a stark raving lunatic who should be removed from office:

Pelosi on Friday backed the creation of a congressionally appointed commission that would determine whether a president is capable of performing his duties, insisting that it wasn’t specifically about President Trump while suggesting that his recent diagnosis was the motivation for it. Pelosi said Trump’s coronavirus infection has raised questions about presidential succession, which is governed by the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. Trump spent last weekend at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, setting off a flurry of inquiries about whether Vice President [Mike] Pence would assume authority, even temporarily.

Insisting the bill has nothing to do with the current White House inhabitant, the Speaker said, “This is not about President Trump. He will face the judgment of the voters, but he shows the need for us to create a process for future presidents.“ She added later that, again, while this is about the office of the presidency in general, it was inspired by the off-the-rails crazy behavior of one president in particular. “This legislation applies to future presidents, but we are reminded of the necessity of action by the health of the current president,” she said.

Trump to undergo a “medical evaluation” on Tucker Carlson’s show

The Trump administration has received a lot of flack for refusing to divulge crucial details regarding the president’s health, including when he last tested negative for COVID-19 and whether he is currently testing positive. So tonight, to prove to the world he’s an open book, Trump will submit to a live medical exam by a real doctor for all the world to see—and by live medical exam by a real doctor we mean a pretaped telehealth session with a guy employed by Fox News:

The physician conducting the exam is Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox contributor who suggested in 2016, without evidence and without conducting a personal exam, that Hillary Clinton might be suffering from lingering effects of a concussion that could compromise her fitness to serve. Dr. Siegel, an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, “will conduct a medical evaluation and interview during the program,” Fox said in a statement. “It is virtual,” Dr. Siegel told Fox Business Network on Friday. “But I’ve been doing tele-visits for months and I’m getting quite good at them.”

The network did not say how Dr. Siegel would be able to accurately assess the president’s condition without employing the sorts of procedures used at in-person exams, or if he intended to discuss the kind of sensitive information that typically passes confidentially between doctor and patient. A spokesman for NYU Langone said that Dr. Siegel’s comments “do not reflect the opinion of” the hospital and that “in his role as senior medical correspondent for Fox News, Dr. Siegel expresses his own personal opinions.”

We’ll have to wait for the fake exam to actually air, but the odds are high to extremely high that those opinions that NYU wants to distance itself from are that the president has an IQ of 280, could run a marathon in under two hours, and “fucks like a man half his age.” Those results will probably then be put on White House letterhead, and when the press corps asks how we can trust that Trump is in good health when he hits the campaign trail again, Kayleigh McEnany will sneer, “I have a copy of Dr. Siegel’s letter right here if you’d like to see it.”

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Elsewhere!

Trump Engineered a Sudden Windfall in 2016 as Campaign Funds Dwindled (New York Times)

Twitter Will Turn Off Some Features to Fight Election Misinformation (New York Times)

Jamie Dimon Doesn’t See a Return to Normal Until Middle of Next Year (Bloomberg)

Trump Says He Now Wants Bigger Stimulus Than Democrats Offering (Bloomberg; earlier)

Inside the Trump Campaign’s Strategy to Make Voting a Tooth-and-Nail Fight (New York Times)

McConnell Says Stimulus “Unlikely” Before Election Despite Trump’s Desperation (Axios)

“They Want to Take Care of Certain Little Tiny Fish”: Trump’s Hannity Interview Was Off the Rails (Vox)

Connecticut City OKs Renaming Sewage Plant for John Oliver (Associated Press)

— Progressives Are Going Rogue to Flip Pennsylvania for Biden
— White House Reporters Fume Over Team Trump’s “Reckless” COVID Response
— Why Anti–Trump Attack Ads Might Actually Be Helping Him
— Tax Mess Aside, Can Trump Pay Off His $1 Billion in Debt?
— News Media Begins to Contemplate a Post–Trump White House
— The Kimberly Guilfoyle Sexual Harassment Allegations Get Even Darker
— As Trump Falters, Democrats See an Expanding 2020 Senate Map
— From the Archive: Inside Trump’s Twisted, Epic Battle for Mar-a-Lago
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