Shane Goldmacher

It would have seemed to be the perfect made-for-local-TV moment: a reporter’s hard-nosed questions about potential corruption allegations eliciting an angry rebuke from Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY). Full coverage to follow, right? But things quickly got complicated when Gov Cuomo veered sharply away from a question about hundreds of thousands of dollars from possible straw donors, and began to attack the parent company of the veteran reporter who had asked it, Zack Fink of NY1. “Speaking of fraud, Charter Spectrum has been executing fraud on the people of this state,” Gov Cuomo said.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Doanld Trump. Just days earlier, KT McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter. President Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.

It took Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) four months and three weeks of “careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience” to declare publicly that he would vote for Donald Trump. He made the decision to profit by selling his supporter list to Trump far faster than that. Just six weeks after he dropped out – and more than a month before Sen Cruz would dramatically snub the nominee at the Republican National Convention – the senator quietly began renting his vast donor e-mail file to his former rival, pocketing at least tens of thousands of dollars, and more likely hundreds of thousands, that can be used to bankroll the Texan’s own political future.