Roane Carey, The Nation’s managing editor, reports from Houston on the political battles there: Developers have defeated local anti-growth groups, but they can’t stop the climate changes that have brought unprecedented rainfall and flooding.
Plus: Erwin Chemerinsky, the new dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, says Trump’s Pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is “outrageous”—because it violates the separation of powers, and encourages the police to ignore Latinos’ constitutional right to liberty.
And if you wanted to discredit the idea that Russians hacked the DNC and sent what they found there to Wikileaks to help Donald Trump, you’d need a counter-theory—right? Bob Dreyfuss looks at the leading Republican counter-theory, and how it crashed and burned.
Jon Wiener: We heard for months about the hostility between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. Now Jared has won the battle. But why was this battle being fought, in the first place?
On August 24, 1967, fifty years ago today, Abbie Hoffman and a group of friends invaded the heart of American capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. They threw money from the visitors’ gallery onto the floor, and the brokers and traders there leapt into the air to grab the dollar bills floating down. Trading was interrupted, briefly. News coverage was massive. . . .
Frank Rich has been “wallowing in Watergate,” as he put it, and found some fascinating stuff about Trump’s situation today and Nixon’s a year before his fall. Also: the ways Nixon was significantly stronger than Trump in resisting impeachment and resignation.
Steve Bannon says his departure as chief strategist at the Trump White House leaves the Wall Street Democrats led by Jared Kushner in charge there. Is he right? Amy Wilentz, our Chief Jared Correspondent, outlines the differences between Jared and Bannon on key issues.
In Steve Bannon’s now-famous call to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect the day before he was fired, Bannon described the white supremacists who had marched in Charlottesville as “losers” and “a collection of clowns.” Of course, those are the same sorts of people Bannon mobilized to vote for Trump, the most loyal part of his base. I asked Joshua Green about that . . .
JW: The Confederate statue that was ostensibly the focus of the events in Charlottesville was of Robert E. Lee, who surrendered at Appomattox in 1865. What can you tell us about this statue?
Joshua Green talks about Steve Bannon’s relationship with Donald Trump —Green’s best-selling book is “Devi’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.”
The white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville use the Confederacy as a symbol of white supremacy, says award-winning historian Eric Foner. Is Donald Trump a neo-Confederate? To call him that suggests he has coherent ideas—which clearly he does not. He does know that these kinds of people are part of his political base—as he made clear 
“Wallowing in Watergate” is a phrase that Nixon used after two months of brutal Senate Watergate hearings in July, 1973—the “what did he know and when did he know it” part of Watergate. With his typical faux-piety, Nixon said, “Let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job.” That’s the sort of thing we’ve heard other presidents say when they’re under attack for scandal, including the current one.
