Trump’s “Lock Her Up” campaign against Hillary Clinton is the perfect example of how this loop works. Conspiracy theorists say that Clinton belongs in prison, the Trump campaign embraces the theme—in a manner unprecedented in modern politics—and then everyone is disappointed and angry that Clinton isn’t actually getting locked up. 

In the latest example, Trump called on Monday for a special prosecutor to investigate any illicit coordination between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. Trump told an audience in Akron, Ohio: “Some former prosecutors have even suggested that the coordination between the pay-for-play State Department and the Clinton Foundation constitute a clear example of RICO—Racketeering, Influence, Corrupt Organization—enterprise.” 

So who are these former prosecutors saying that Clinton was involved in RICO violations? One of them may very well be Rudy Giuliani, a highly visible Trump campaign surrogate. “She is the consummate, corrupt, Washington insider. And she is thoroughly corrupt, and so is the Clinton Foundation,” Giuliani declared on Fox News Sunday. “If I were back in my old job as U.S. Attorney, I would probably indict the Clinton Foundation as a racketeering enterprise.” 

So there you have the Trump campaign’s primary citation for its accusations against Clinton: the Trump campaign itself.

At this point, it might seem like there’s not much more you can say about the rampant sexual harassment that went down at Fox News under former head Roger Ailes. But the new lawsuit from Tantaros—posted online by Think Progress—really goes the extra mile in depicting the network’s pervasive environment of exploitation and retaliation, for which she is now seeking a total of up to $49 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

This culture allegedly spread to the on-air talent, including the former senator from Massachusetts:

On or about August 18, 2015, former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (“Brown”) appeared on Outnumbered. Brown made a number of sexually inappropriate comments to Tantaros on set, including, and in a suggestive manner, that Tantaros “would be fun to go to a nightclub with.” After the show was over, Brown snuck up behind Tantaros while she was purchasing lunch and put his hands on her lower waist. She immediately pulled back, telling Brown to “stop.” Tantaros then immediately met with [executive Bill] Shine to complain, asking him to ensure that Brown would never be booked on the show again. Shine said that he would talk to Scott. Thereafter, Shine and Scott ignored Tantaros’s complaint, and continued to book Brown on Outnumbered.

Tantaros also alleges that Bill O’Reilly invited her to stay at his home on Long Island, where he told her it would be “very private.” He reportedly told her multiple times he could “see you as a wild girl.” When Tantaros complained, she says, the only response she received was that she would no longer be invited to appear on The O’Reilly Factor.

Brown denies the accusations, saying they are “completely and totally false.”

Tantaros also says she complained about Ailes’s sexual advances, as well as his well-known demands that she wear tight, revealing clothes on-air and show off her body to him. In response, she was allegedly subjected to bad publicity in Ailes-linked media outlets like TVNewser and defamed by sock-puppet accounts on social media. This came in addition to being booted from The Five, which ran at the coveted 5 p.m. ET slot, to the afternoon show Outnumbered. She says executives at Fox News justified the transfer by claiming (falsely, she says, with evidence to back it up) that she had not informed them of her plans to publish a book. Finally, she says they attempted to use a grueling arbitration proceeding to force her into silence.

There’s been a lot of chatter about Trump preferring large rallies and press conferences, instead of spending his campaign’s cash on traditional expenditures like field organization and TV ads. It calls into question whether he is really trying to win—or setting up his own future media empire. But there might be a simpler explanation. What if this kind of spending is the easiest way to funnel donations back to himself?

The Huffington Post reports that donations to Donald Trump’s campaign are now going largely to … Donald Trump, to pay for his own companies’ office spaces, private planes, and resorts.

The biggest tell is that the Trump campaign had been renting office space at Trump Tower for $35,458 per month through last spring, when he was still self-financing. But once he sewed up the nomination and began reeling in donations in a joint fundraising agreement with the RNC, that rent jumped: $72,800 in May, $110,685 in June, and $169,758 in July.

In addition, the campaign has paid out over $260,000 to Trump’s golf courses (he has used those resorts as campaign venues) and to his restaurants. And in July alone, $495,000 was spent for his personal Boeing 757, with “air travel one of the biggest expense categories for his campaign.”

Appearing last night on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, she rebutted the rumors that the Trump campaign is spreading about her health. 

“Here, take my pulse while I’m talking to you,” Clinton said. “Make sure I’m alive.” 

“Oh my God, there’s nothing there!” Kimmel exclaimed.

“Back in October, the National Enquirer said I would be dead in six months,” Clinton said. “So with every breath I take, I feel like it’s a repudiation.” 

“You have a new lease on life,” Kimmel offered. 

“Yeah, a new lease on life. I don’t know why they are saying this. I think on the one hand it’s part of the wacky strategy: Just say all these crazy things, and maybe you can get some people to believe you. On the other hand, it just absolutely makes no sense.”

The final health challenge from Jimmy: Open a jar of pickles. (She passed the test.) 

And to throw in some extra ridicule of Trump, Kimmel had Clinton read actual Donald Trump quotes out of a fishbowl lined with a Trump wig. Clinton drew the line at actually reading this one out loud—so Jimmy did it instead: “I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

In the spirit of always fighting the last war, Republicans are kicking around the idea of imposing strict barriers to entry into the Republican presidential primary field four years from now.

“Let’s make running for the Republican nomination a truly conservative affair,” writes John Noonan, former adviser to Jeb Bush. “You want it? Earn it. Raise $5 million for the RNC in the years before the nomination and only then do you qualify to run.”

This kind of thing may be necessary if the GOP is to avoid another Trumpening, but also woefully insufficient. Noonan’s specific idea would be difficult to implement for some of the reasons he lays out in the article. It also probably wouldn’t have stopped Trump from running this cycle, thanks in large part to the Supreme Court’s decision in McCutcheon two years ago, which made it much easier for rich people to raise money for official party committees.

But let’s imagine a rule that would’ve foreclosed a Trump candidacy altogether was in place as of 2015—for instance, one holding that to run, you must have won elected office as a Republican within the past 12 years.

Maybe Trump would’ve just sat the whole thing out. But he might’ve driven a near-majority of the GOP’s base into a third party. Or, he might’ve made the qualifying candidates compete for his endorsement by establishing politically toxic criterion: mass deportation, commitment to a border fence, other commitments that would’ve Trumpified the winning candidate.

Remember, it’s not like Trump barely edged out the establishment. The runner-up was Ted Cruz; basically everyone else got no traction at all. Absent Trump, Cruz would’ve consolidated the charlatan wing of the party, and the influencers now propping up Trump would be doing the same for Cruz, only with somewhat less establishment resistance.

The problems the GOP faces, in other words, can’t be papered over with narrow process adjustments. After determining that the 2012 GOP primary had done severe political damage to Mitt Romney, the RNC changed its rules in an effort to prevent the same thing from happening to their next nominee. Among other things, they scheduled fewer debates and moved the Republican National Convention back several weeks. The goal was to protect the frontrunner from too many televised shitshows and to allow the winner to engage in the general election as early as possible. In the end, the decisions they made largely backfired. If GOP elites respond to this election by trying to freeze out their carnival barkers, the carnival barkers will simply adjust their efforts to influence the outcome, with unpredictable consequences.

On the one hand, it was refreshing—borderline shocking, really—to see Shinzo Abe, the buttoned-down Japanese prime minister, show his lighter side at the closing ceremony of the Rio Olympics. On the other, can you imagine the leader of any other country doing adult cosplay on top of a giant green tube? Abe himself seemed to have doubts about the spectacle, suddenly realizing that he was, in fact, waving a floppy red hat and holding a red ball in front of millions of people, like some variation of the dream where you’re standing naked in front of the class.

Other countries are, to a fault, intent on demonstrating their strength. (Hello, America.) But Japan is almost perverse in its opposite commitment to flaunting its gentle benignity. This is especially relevant since Abe is considered a hard-liner on issues of national security, and for years has been trying to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution. The result may seem schizophrenic—paying tribute to Japanese war criminals one day, and dressing up as a cute video game character the next. But it is actually of a piece with Japan’s post-war tension between asserting itself as a global power and apologizing for its rapacious militarism in World War II.

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor on Sunday night blocked Obama administration guidelines that require publicly funded schools to allow students to use the bathroom that best conforms with their gender identities.

According to Reuters, O’Connor ruled that the Obama administration had improperly issued the guidelines, which interpreted Title IX in a manner that prohibited discrimination against transgender students.

The ruling is a victory for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who headed a lawsuit joined by Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Maine, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Paxton, a vocal critic of transgender rights, recruited two attorneys from the far-right, religiously affiliated Liberty Institute. Critics also accused him of shopping the suit around so he could file it in O’Connor’s district; the judge is a George W. Bush appointee.

O’Connor’s ruling doesn’t overturn the Obama administration’s guidelines. He has just blocked them from enforcement pending further legal action. Still, he’s dealt a major blow to transgender students, who already face higher than average rates of bullying and harassment in school.

The Hugos, the major fan awards given out every year at the World Science Fiction Convention, have been bedeviled the last few years by a political controversy that eerily mirrors general American politics. Two reactionary factions—the conservative Sad Puppies and the white nationalist Rabid Puppies—have been manipulating the nomination process to push back against the fiction they don’t like: largely works with progressive themes written by women and people of color.

The Rabid Puppies are like Trump and the Sad Puppies are like Mike Pence. Both factions are supported by Breitbart. Together, they are strong enough to dominate the nomination process, where very few people vote. This year, as last year, the list of nominees was top heavy with Puppies favorites. But the Puppies aren’t strong enough to actually win the awards. As in last year, the big awards all went to writers on the non-Puppies slate, with the Puppies generally only winning when they listed work that had long-standing popularity outside their advocacy.

As Slate reports:

All four of the fiction categories were awarded to women: Best Novel went to N.K. Jemisin for The Fifth Season, Best Novella went to Nnedi Okorafor for Binti, Best Novelette went to Hao Jingfang for “Folding Beijing,” translated by Ken Liu and published in the January–February 2015 issue of Uncanny magazine, and Best Short Story went to Naomi Kritzer for “Cat Pictures Please,” published in the January 2015 issue of Clarkesworld. N.K. Jemisin and [Rabid Puppy leader Theodore Beale] have a history: In 2013, Beale called Jemison, who is black, “an educated, but ignorant half-savage,” leading to his expulsion from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

It came as little surprise this afternoon when Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the recently rebranded conservative party Les Républicains and former president of France between 2007 and 2012, announced his plans to re-seek the presidency in the upcoming 2017 elections. The announcement came in the form of a carefully crafted tweet in which the former president posted a photo of a blurb from the back-cover of his upcoming book, Tout pour la France (Everything for France).

Sarkozy enters what is already a remarkably fractured political scene. Against the backdrop of economic insecurity, the specter of terrorist attacks, and a cultural backlash against foreigners and immigrants, the loyalties and fault-lines that have defined the terms of debate in the country over the past several decades are showing signs of disintegration and re-alignment.

In this climate, Sarkozy is attempting to stake out his place in the new French right by forestalling the rise of Marine Le Pen. The National Front currently enjoys record levels of popularity. Following its success in the 2015 regional elections, Le Pen declared it the “first party” of France. Sarkozy seeks to incorporate elements of his competitor’s rhetoric, vowing to preserve French “identity” and restore public “authority” in the “numerous areas” where it no longer holds sway.

The situation on the left is no more orderly, as François Hollande is loathed by many in his own party. Having campaigned in 2012 as something of an anti-neoliberal populist, he has caved in the face of stiff resistance from international finance and sought a variety of labor market liberalizations and reforms. The sitting president is so unpopular that, should he decide to run for office again, he will first be forced into a primary battle with a widening field of candidates from his own party.