On your honor

First things first: Thanks for your emails—both pro and con. Some of you have written to say thanks for a column that you consider to be an informed (and opinionated) news source—and some of you have written to tell me lay off the President, whom you consider to be an honorable man using his God-given talents to move our country forward and defend our Constitution.

Ha! Just kidding with that last part! Even Trump’s fervent supporters don’t think like this—though some of you have expressed support of his steering of the economy, and I’ve got to hand it to you: You’re right: The stock market is up, by 27.7 percent, through Trump’s first 371 days.* (Though under Obama’s first 371 days, it was up by 38.5 percent.) New job growth is also up—but not as up as it was under Obama. (Trump’s first year featured the fewest new jobs created in seven years.)

*This 27.7 percent figure was taken before February 5, when the Dow Jones average took its biggest-ever one-day point drop, plunging 1,175 points. And while Trump has taken credit dozens of times since he’s been elected for jumps in the stock market, he was suddenly and conspicuously silent about the downturn. (Sean Hannity, thankfully, sprang quickly to the rescue: He blamed the drop on Obama. And no, that’s not a joke.)

I can only say: Keep the emails coming. I try to answer every letter sent to me at [email protected].

The big news of the last few weeks has been The Memo. You heard about The Memo, right? Fox News was—heck, still is!—pushing The Memo like it was the Rosetta Stone and the Super Bowl rolled up into one gigantic, nonsensical conspiracy theory. Sean Hannity spent weeks breathlessly promising that The Memo, the single most shocking revelation in American political history, was going to blow the lid off the secret FBI Deep State conspiracy cover-up led by Hillary Clinton and funded by George Soros to undermine Trump and implement lesbian feminist Sharia law across the country.

There was just one problem: The Memo turned out to be a dead-on-arrival dud. (I’ll admit it: I was worried. Having spent much of my spare time in the last year reading hundreds of news sources from around the world in an attempt to understand what Bob Mueller’s investigation is all about, I was baffled as to what Fox News might know that I didn’t. As it tured out: Nothing. When I read the 3.5-page hack job—some kind of cherry-picked, one-sided right-wing Cliff’s Notes to a rigorously by-the-book investigation by a dream team of investigators and prosecutors (the vast majority of them lifelong Republicans)—I almost burst out laughing.