Any suspense in the presidential election is fizzling out, with Hillary Clinton almost certain to defeat Donald Trump. So what’s a House Republican to do?

The Hill reports that the House Judiciary Committee is set to hold a hearing next month with FBI officials, as part of an effort to build a case that Clinton perjured herself during that epic 11-hour hearing before the Benghazi Committee last October. Republicans intend to zero in on statements Clinton made about the handling of classified information in her emails, some of which were later shown to be false by the FBI. The move is seen as an effort by the GOP to keep the email controversy alive through the election, and it’s easy to see how it could be stretched well beyond that.

According to experts cited in the article, any inconsistencies in Clinton’s statements would not realistically lead to any criminal charges that could result in conviction. But this story is a very useful reminder that, assuming Republicans keep the House, a Hillary Clinton presidency will not pave the way for an era of political reconciliation. Instead, it’s far more likely that we’ll see an effort to impeach another President Clinton.

There are two ways to interpret the mostly glowing reviews the media is giving Trump for his speech in North Carolina Thursday night. Both are correct.

The first, intimated here by Greg Sargent, is that the media is setting a low bar for Trump. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, political media abhors a boring story about a stale, predictable race. This made a comeback narrative necessary, and inflated reviews of bad performances inevitable.

But viewed from another angle, it’s a manifestation of the phenomenon I described in my article today, which is about how Donald Trump is actually a very bad politician, but bad in a way that creates the illusion of political talent if you’re too close to the campaign.

In truth, if Trump actually did make the kind of overnight transformation his supporters have been promising, it would be fairly horrifying. Jeckyll and Hyde is a great premise for a mystery thriller, but a very bad trait in a president.

By any usual-though-subjective standard of political theater criticism, though, Trump’s Great August Pivot speech was unremarkable. Better written than most of his prepared speeches, but still not very good. He mostly said a bunch of things he’s said before, while adding in a few tossed off lines about how, regrettably, he’s lashed out in anger over and over again this year due to the stresses of political life. Buckles under pressure. Great sales pitch!

In any case, the good reviews followed in part because of an undying belief in the political media that the connection Trump has made to superfan voters must have some correlation in the nuts and bolts of campaigning. If only he could stop traducing women, minorities and the Constitution, he’d be an unstoppable political force.

But Trump is just Trump. Pretty good at being a demagogue, very bad at doing politics. It is no coincidence that the day after the Great August Pivot, one of his two—two—campaign chairs (the corrupt one, not the white nationalist one) resigned amid a torrent of news stories about how he helped oligarchs plunder poor Ukrainians, in contravention of of U.S. interests, and probably federal law as well. Only a bad politician would find himself in a crazy situation like that. And that’s all Trump is.

Manafort has officially left the campaign, following a week that saw the ascension of Breitbart head Stephen Bannon:

“This morning Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign. I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process. Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success.”

There have been a spate of recent headlines about Manafort’s past extensive involvement with the pro-Russian regime of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a 2014 revolution. While Manafort’s work for Yanukovych was already a matter of public record, new details revealed this week included allegedly undisclosed cash payments of $12.7 million, his work in funneling money to U.S. lobbyists, and even his possible involvement in a 2006 riot in Crimea against U.S. troops and NATO.

But it’s not just Manafort. Consider Trump’s own long public admiration for Vladimir Putin; his public incitement for Russian hackers to go after Hillary Clinton; and that his campaign worked to soften the GOP’s platform stance on Ukraine.

In yet another case study of the grifterism that has taken over politics on the right, The Daily Beast reports that the Breitbart editor’s college scholarship “charity” for white males has so far only benefited just one white man: himself.

The scholarship’s rollout this past January received a glowing announcement in Breitbart: “In a move certain to infuriate the left, Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos has created the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, a scholarship exclusively available to white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female, queer, and ethnic minority classmates.”

Yiannopoulos claims that the fund has taken in between $100,000 and $250,000. But according to Margaret MacLennan, a Canadian conservative on YouTube who was brought in as its director, she was never even given the software needed to set up the operation as a real charity and to review scholarship applications. And just to make the scam even more blatant, the donation document is simply a bank transfer form to send the money to Yiannopoulos’s personal account. Experts also told The Daily Beast that the manner in which Yiannopoulos was raising money is likely a violation of charity laws in many states.

Donald Trump is really just a larger version of this: a poisonous mixture of white male identity politics and ripping people off.

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding Trump’s supposed apology last night at a rally in Charlotte, leading to speculation that the the new crowd running his campaign has convinced him to make a pivot to a gentler, kinder Trump. But if you pay close attention to how the speech actually went, it’s hard to see how that’s the case.

“Sometimes in the heat of debate, and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t chose the right words, or you say the wrong thing. I have done that,” Trump said, as the audience cheered and he grinned. “And believe it or not, I regret it!”

The crowd then cheered even more, he gave them a thumb-up, and they began chanting, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

The line “believe it or not” is likely improvised from a speech that otherwise came over the teleprompter, since it’s really not the sort of thing a speechwriter would write. What we see here is an obvious lack of sincerity. There was even a sort of joy, on the part of both Trump and his supporters, that he was saying it and didn’t mean it.

So how long did this shift in tone last? Only until the next morning, when he got his phone back and could go on Twitter again:

The speech reveals why Trump will never pivot. His audiences truly love it when he says offensive things and lobs insults at people. They aren’t coming to his rallies for apologies, and the one thing he has demonstrated is that he knows how to give them what they do want.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Trump’s candidacy has barely been touched on: He has brought into political discourse the idea that we should plunder countries for oil, and that the United States military should be turned into an agent of that plunder.

This is not even an exaggeration. The point came up again at a town hall event that Trump held with Sean Hannity this week. Hannity started with the falsehood that Trump had opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. Trump then repeated it himself, before going on to detail his own vision for occupation.

“But the way we got out was ridiculous. But I’ve been saying something ever since I’ve known you: Keep the oil,” Trump said, repeating that refrain as the crowd applauded. “And I said, when we went in, you know, in the old days, to the victor belonged the spoils.”

He added: “Now, if they would’ve done that, there would be no ISIS. I said keep the oil. And I think most of the audience has heard me say it 200 times—I mean every time practically. ... So I wanted to get out, but I wanted to keep the oil. So by nature, that means you’re staying in, because you’re going to have to guard the oil, etc., etc. But that oil is very prized oil, believe me.”

Trump has been talking about occupying Iraq’s oil areas since at least last August. If this were actually put into practice, chances are there would still be an ISIS—and a lot more armies of Iraqi national resistance. And this time, the United States would not be able to count on any of its traditional Western democratic allies to wage a project of imperialistic piracy.

While it’s looking very unlikely Trump will become president, he has accomplished something truly disturbing: bringing this kind of talk into the political mainstream, and getting crowds of people, plus members of the conservative media, to cheer it on.

After a baffling summer where Hillary Clinton’s team was allowed to dominate advertising, the Trump campaign is finally making its first ad buy in swing states—and it’s tiny. Trump is spending $270,000 in Florida, $72,000 in Ohio, and $78,000 in Pennsylvania. By point of comparison, Clinton has already spent $23 million in Florida, $17 million in Ohio, and $6 million in Pennsylvania. So Trump’s spending splurge puts him at less than 1 percent of his rival (and that’s without counting states where Trump isn’t spending money at all).

In effect, Clinton is playing with dollars while Trump is playing with pennies. This tends to cast doubt not just on his claims to be a billionaire, but on the entire motive of his campaign. If Trump isn’t spending money on ads, what is he spending it on? Where are the donations going? And is he really trying to win, or just create more buzz for his brand, which he can perhaps spin off into a media empire after the election?

J.K. Trotter is reporting that Gawker.com is shutting down next week, confirming rumors that Univision, which on Tuesday reached a $135 million deal to buy Gawker Media, is not interested in maintaining the flagship site, even as it absorbs Gawker Media’s six other sites. The closing of Gawker represents a victory for Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that pushed Gawker Media into bankruptcy and, by extension, turned Gawker.com into damaged goods in the eyes of the corporate world.

There will be longer, deeper obituaries written about Gawker, which started off as a New York-centric, media-gossip blog before expanding into a national outlet with immense reach and influence. But suffice it to say that Gawker is embedded in online media’s DNA, which you can see for yourself by simply taking a look around this very page. And after 14 years of near-constant churn and innovation, it was still better at what it did than all its imitators. Though its sensibility is everywhere, it is almost impossible to imagine the media landscape without it.

And the Obama administration agrees, announcing that it will end the federal use of private prisons, a major new policy that has been sought by criminal justice reformers.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on Thursday instructed officials that when existing contracts come up for renewal, they are to either decline to do so or “substantially reduce” their scope. The relevant contracts will all come up for renewal over the next five years.

“The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services,” Yates told The Washington Post, “and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that.”

In addition to an Inspector General’s report finding serious problems with safety and security for both inmates and staff in private prisons, there was also the recent, brutal exposé by Mother Jones’s Shane Bauer, who went undercover as a staffer at a private prison housing state inmates in Louisiana. In that piece, Bauer detailed chilling accounts of inferior medical care—including an inmate who lost both his legs and his fingers to untreated gangrene—sexual assaults, and other abusive practices, as well as the frequent cancellation of such rehabilitative services as the law library, education and job training, and drug counseling.

One thing to bear in mind, though, is this does not by itself signal the end of private prisons. According to Bauer’s statistics, most of the private prison population comes from state judicial systems, not the federal system.