President Donald Trump has found that running the federal government is much more difficult than running a reality TV show.

According to a new report from Axios reporter Mike Allen, Trump is feeling “baffled and paralyzed” as he’s started to realize that he can’t just order elected lawmakers to do his bidding the same way he used to boss around Celebrity Apprentice hopefuls.

“President Trump brought his chaos-and-loyalty theory of management into the White House, relying on competing factions, balanced by trusted family members, with himself perched atop as the gut-instinct decider,” the report claims. “He now realizes this approach has flopped.”

Allen’s sources say that Trump advisers spend much of their evenings calling up reporters and trashing their own colleagues, which has created an atmosphere of “suspicion and insecurity” that is even “worse than what you read.”

Allen also claims that former Reince Priebus deputy Katie Walsh quit her job at the White House this week because she was tired of working in an environment reminiscent of Game of Thrones.

Cohen-Watnick is a protege of Michael Flynn. He appears to be plugged into the DC Islamophobe network, anti-CIA, etc., along with Flynn. The President took extraordinary steps to protect Cohen-Watnick as recently as a couple weeks ago. Whether the President did this based on his own knowledge of the situation or simply because Bannon and Kushner asked him to isn't clear. It also may not matter.

Cohen-Watnick went to extraordinary, at least highly improper and likely illegal, steps to engage in political pushback on the President's behalf. There is at least some circumstantial evidence that he was doing this to monitor or subvert the FBI's investigation of the President and his top associates. Whether political pushback or obstruction, it is unlikely Cohen-Watnick would take such perilous steps on his own. Remember, Director of Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council. A simple review of the calendar makes it all but certain that Cohen-Watnick was up to this funny business at the same time Bannon and Kushner intervened to save his job - and, with that job, his almost unrivaled access to all US intelligence.

A recap of the timeline is helpful: McMaster reportedly told Cohen-Watnick he was out on the March 10th. By the 14th, McMaster had been overruled by President Trump. Devin Nunes's midnight run to the White House to get a look at Cohen-Watnick's handiwork came on the 21st.

As I've noted, big scandals create a vast gravitational field around them. People apparently unrelated to the main action keep getting pulled in. Until the full story is told, our best means of judging the scope of these scandals is the pull they have over those nearby. Things like this don't happen unless there's something big to hide. Incompetence and malevolence certainly play a role. The Trumpian need to fight every accusation and slight do as well. But none of those secondary factors explain what we're seeing.

Moscow (CNN)Russian President Vladimir Putin has described allegations that his country meddled in the 2016 US election as "fictional, illusory, provocations and lies."

Asked directly on Thursday whether Russia interfered in the election, Putin said: "Read my lips: No."

If Neil Gorsuch isn’t good enough, there’s never going to be a nominee good enough, and so I don’t see any advantage to rewarding bad behavior,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said of a potential deal with Democrats to head off the crisis.

In light of House Speaker Paul Ryan's revelations this week that House Republicans plan to continue pushing to overhaul the health care system in the months ahead, despite their colossal failure to pass the American Health Care Act (AHCA), there's one truth we can't repeat to each other enough: The AHCA would have amounted to attempted mass murder on a national scale, and the implications of its near-success are flatly terrifying.

The total collapse of the AHCA -- the GOP-designed legislative torpedo intended to sink Obamacare once and for all -- was seen as a stinging rebuke for President Trump, Speaker Ryan and the Republican Party in general. It raised doubts about their ability to govern and keep their promises, and the defeat put their whole legislative agenda in peril. Many people took great joy from these developments, and from watching the Republicans try to puzzle their way through why the whole thing exploded so ignominiously in their faces.

Trump, as is his way, meandered through the blame game with typical stagger-step precision. It was the Democrats fault, no, the media's fault, no, Ryan's fault, no, the sink in the bathroom's fault, until eventually blame for the fiasco was properly laid at the feet of a clutch of ultra-conservative House members who call themselves the Freedom Caucus. These Flat-Earth bitter-enders are a real piece of work; their entire purpose in government is to destroy government. They took one look at the AHCA, deemed it too generous, and locked themselves together in a Trojan phalanx of "No" votes that ultimately ran the thing onto the reef.

That's the horserace crap, the kind of "details" and "substance" we got during media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign. The rancid meat on this bone, however, can be found in the bloody body of the AHCA itself. Before Ryan started meddling with it to try and placate the Freedom Caucus, the bill was already an astonishment of greed and cruelty...