Just as a reminder of what a terrible dealmaker Donald Trump is, a Saudi Prince bought the Plaza Hotel in New York today in a deal that values the hotel at $600 million. In 1988, Trump bought the hotel and then renovated it at a cost of $950 million in current dollars.

Even after 30 years and over a decade of escalating prices for New York real estate, the Plaza still isn’t even close to being worth what Trump paid for it. He could have waited a century and not made money on it. This is the guy who will be negotiating North Korea’s nuclear program with Kim Jong Un.

Go Nakamura via ZUMA

Today, the New York Times gives us a taste of the kind of thing that special prosecutor Robert Mueller must have in his possession after seizing Michael Cohen’s business records:

Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, used the shell company, Essential Consultants L.L.C., for an array of business activities that went far beyond what was publicly known. Transactions adding up to at least $4.4 million flowed through Essential Consultants starting shortly before Mr. Trump was elected president and continuing to this January, the records show. Among the previously unreported transactions were payments last year of about $500,000 from Columbus Nova, an investment firm in New York whose biggest client is a company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, the Russian oligarch.

Columbus Nova says the money was a “consulting fee.” And they weren’t the only ones:

AT&T made four payments totaling $200,000 between October 2017 and January 2018, according to the documents. AT&T, whose proposed merger with Time Warner is pending before the Justice Department, issued a statement on Tuesday evening confirming that it made payments to Mr. Cohen’s firm. “Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration,” the statement said. “They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”

$200,000 for “insights” into the Trump administration! Not bad. I wonder what Cohen told them?

Yomiuri Shimbun via AP

Here is Alex Ward:

What does Donald Trump’s stance on the Iran deal have to do with his relationship with North Korea? It turns out, quite a lot.

That’s because the president’s desire to pull out of a historic nuclear deal with Iran could likely hurt his chances of reaching a significant weapons agreement with Pyongyang. There’s a simple reason why, experts tell me: If Trump backtracks on America’s promises to Tehran, then North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has no reason to trust Trump during negotiations about Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.

I think this is backward. It assumes that Kim will conclude that Trump can’t be trusted to keep his word. But if Kim is smart, that’s not at all what he’ll assume.

What is it that motivates Trump? We’ve all said it a million times: taking revenge on Barack Obama. And more generally, taking revenge on the political and cultural elites that have mocked him his entire life. Trump isn’t especially notorious for breaking his word, but he is notorious for nursing eternal dreams of vengeance against his enemies.

It hardly takes 3D chess analogies to figure out what this means. Obama couldn’t make a deal with Kim, which means Trump desperately wants to. Foreign policy elites have long declared North Korea a rogue state, so Trump wants to show that they were just too stupid to figure out how to handle the Kim family. And if Trump does make a deal, it will be his deal. He’ll defend it loudly and passionately no matter what. A nuclear missile could be in the air a minute from the White House and Trump would still be claiming that he made a great deal with Kim.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Trump will agree to anything. At the very least, his advisors will make sure of that. But killing the Iran deal is a very clear confirmation of his temperament: he may hate other people’s deals, but as long as it’s Trump’s deal—and the Obamas of the world disparage it—he can be trusted to stick with it. I’d guess that the odds of a deal with North Korea are now a bit better than they were a month ago.

POSTSCRIPT: Will it be a good deal? Will we get it quickly? I don’t know. But Kim probably understands his own leverage better than before. He knows what Trump wants, and that will make it a little easier to construct an agreement he’s likely to accept.

Here’s another black-and-white photo. This one is a treeline on a ridge just south of Nevada Fall in Yosemite National Park. The clouds were looking very dramatic when I took it, which was a little unusual since we had pretty clear skies for most of our visit.

Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua via ZUMA

President Trump has officially announced that he will withdraw from the Iran deal. For something that everyone’s known for weeks or months, he sure got a lot of media mileage out of it. But I wonder if this is really true:

A second person familiar with negotiations to keep the 2015 accord in place said the talks collapsed over Mr. Trump’s insistence that sharp limits be kept on Iran’s nuclear fuel production after 2030. The deal currently lifts those limits.

It sure doesn’t sound true. I can’t believe that Trump cares a whit about what happens in 2030, and I doubt that anyone else does either. But I suppose it’s a handy excuse.

Anyway, I guess we’re now back to the North Korea strategy: keep ratcheting up sanctions in hopes that their economy will collapse before they successfully build a nuclear bomb. That worked great! I’m sure it will work great with Iran too.

My Twitter feed is full of blather about “the Bari Weiss” article this morning, so I figured it was my duty to check it out:

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”…It’s a pattern that has become common in our new era of That Which Cannot Be Said. And it is the reason the Intellectual Dark Web, a term coined half-jokingly by Mr. Weinstein, came to exist.

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger….The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network….But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

Wait. The intellectual dark web has its own website? And over here is an article about how to join the IDW. And here are the “five big moments” that led to the rise of the IDW. These are just a few among hundreds of articles written about the IDW lately. As Green Arrow once said to Batman, “that’s a loud kind of mysterious, man.” They could hardly be any less dark if they had a full-time PR shop.

I wonder if I qualify for the IDW? I certainly agree that there are biological differences between men and women—although I have a feeling Weiss toned that down a wee bit to protect the guilty.¹ On the other hand, I’d say that free speech generally seems to be in OK shape, as you might guess from the vast amount of speech these dark intellectuals seem to engage in.² And identity politics—well, it’s on a bit of a bender right now, and I won’t pretend it’s an entirely healthy bender. However, it sure seems to me that what’s really tearing American society apart right now is white backlash against any threat to white interests. Identity politics may have its problems, but it doesn’t control both houses of Congress and the presidency.

I dunno. For an allegedly repressed minority, the names in Weiss’s article sure seem to show up on the op-ed pages I read pretty frequently. They also get attacked a lot, but that comes with the territory. If you’re in the arena, you’re in the arena. Stop whining, and stop pretending like everyone who attacks you is just a shill for conventional wisdom.

Also, they need more charts. I would accept the “intellectual” part of IDW if they had more charts. This is the mark of a true thinking person.

¹The “biological differences” in question are those of personality and intelligence, but Weiss didn’t want to say that for some reason. But here: I’ll say it, because that’s the brave kind of guy I am. Evolution works on the brain just as much as it does on the rest of the body, and it’s entirely possible that there are biologically-based cognitive differences between men and women.³ In fact, we know there are. Just for starters, testosterone ain’t nothing.

²Yeah, some campus kids go overboard on this stuff. Back in the day, we just ignored this stuff and allowed college administrators to deal with it. Today, every single dumb thing that hyped-up college kids do is splashed all over social media by conservatives, primarily for the purpose of disparaging American universities, which they hate. I very much doubt that the actual rate of stupid stuff being done by college kids is any higher than it was 20 years ago.

³Just for the hell of it, I’ll put in a plug here for my favorite amateur candidate for gender-based brain differences: obsession. Men of all ages just seem more prone to develop obsessions. Little boys will shoot hoops for hours on end or collect things with a passion. Grownups become nerds who spend 18 hours a day on subjects that appeal to them. The psychotic ones become serial killers. And whatever causes this, I suspect it’s somehow linked to the greater tendency of men to be autistic. Please note, however, that as far as I know, there is zero scientific evidence to back up my theory. Ignore it at your pleasure.

Last month the number of job openings was greater than the number of unemployed for the first time since 2001. But since we’ve been talking about the declining employment-population ratio lately, I thought it might be interesting to see the number of job openings compared to all nonworking people aged 25-54. Here it is:

Remember that “unemployed” counts only people looking for a job. “Nonworking” is everyone who doesn’t have a job, whether they want one or not. This is the true pool that employers can call on, since lots of people will decide to re-enter the job market if wages get high enough.

Either way, this number is at a record low since records began in 2001. Of course, if records went back a few years earlier, the dotcom boom would have had even lower numbers. That’s the last time that wages truly increased significantly, and it attracted plenty of people back into the labor market.

Via Andrew Sprung, here are the final figures for Obamacare enrollment:

Take a look at the bars on the left. These are from the states that run their own exchanges and actually care about getting people enrolled. There was no decline from 2017 to 2018, even among the unsubsidized population.

Now look at the bars on the right. These are from the states that defaulted to the federal exchange, many of which are either indifferent or hostile to Obamacare. All the losses came from those states.

Bottom line: Nothing is perfect, but Obamacare works fine. That is, it works fine if you put in the minimal effort it takes to administer it properly. Conversely, if you don’t care—or, worse, if you actively try to sabotage it—then it will deteriorate. But that’s true of everything, isn’t it?

Ben Rhodes is an unlikely target of a sophisticated smear campaign. He's the guy on the far left that you don't recognize, behind all the famous people.Anthony Behar / Pool Via Cnp/DPA/ZUMA

The New York Times has obtained a copy of the report that Black Cube compiled on Ben Rhodes, one of the Obama administration’s biggest proponents of the Iran Deal:

A detailed report about Mr. Rhodes, compiled by Black Cube, a private investigations firm established by former intelligence analysts from the Israeli Defense Forces, contains pictures of his apartment in Washington, telephone numbers and email addresses of members of his family, as well as unsubstantiated allegations of personal and ethical transgressions.

It is unclear who hired Black Cube to prepare the report on Mr. Rhodes and a similar report on Colin Kahl, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., which were obtained by The New York Times from a source with knowledge of their provenance….There is no evidence in the documents that indicate any connection to anyone in Mr. Trump’s administration….One person with knowledge of the reports suggested that the company had been hired by a commercial client with an interest in opposing the nuclear deal.

Not the Trumpies, then—at least, not directly. Politically, then, this is of only minor interest. But I’d still like know what organization had a commercial interest in killing the Iran deal. It’s just not common for a corporate enterprise to think about smearing a political figure—especially an obscure one—as a tactic for getting what it wants. So does commercial really mean commercial, or does it merely mean “not an elected official”? Maybe a super PAC of some kind? Or a Sheldon Adelson donor type?

I’m pretty tired of everything being about Trump. If he’s truly not involved in this, that makes it even more interesting. Just who was the commercial client?

UDPATE: On the other hand, Julian Borger, who broke this story in the first place, says the “ultimate customer” was the Trump camp:

Most explicit statement yet tying Trump circle and #BlackCube dirty tricks ops…@julianborger: “our sourcing who are close to this private security firm said it was clear that, when the tasking for this went out, that the ultimate customer was the Trump team, the Trump camp.” https://t.co/FzZkeZO0Cx

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) May 8, 2018

AP Photo/Danny Johnston

I imagine most of you already know this, but just in case:

The Mueller probe is no longer a law enforcement investigation. It’s a hit job. This pleases the Left. Removing Trump is the only principle they recognize. Instead of admitting it, they lecture us about the rule of law, as if they actually care about the Constitution. They don’t.

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 8, 2018

This is basically the unanimous view on Fox News in prime time. If you watch Fox—or listen to Rush or read Breitbart—this is what you believe. Ignore the fact that the Attorney General, the deputy attorney general, the FBI director, and Mueller himself were all put in place by Donald Trump or his appointees. The developing party line is that once Democrats and their allies in the deep state finally realized that Trump was for real and the jig was up, they invented Mueller. His entire investigation is a monstrous, Democrat-fueled deception designed to bring down a president elected by working-class voters who were finally fed up with liberals destroying our country.

This is their story, and it’s spreading more and more widely in conservative ranks. All the conspiracy theories of the past few years; all the “deep state” nonsense; all the hysteria over Benghazi and Hillary’s emails and the war again Christianity: all of it has been spadework for this. Soon, we’re going to find out if Donald Trump really can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it because the American conservative movement has convinced its supporters that it wasn’t a gun, it wasn’t Trump, no one died, and it was all Photoshopped by Democrats anyway.