It would be going too far to say President Trump’s top budget guy is happy to brag about how his boss is an easily manipulable dupe. But not much.

Over the course of an important interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney repeatedly betrays the fact that his ideological goals (as a movement conservative, and founding-member of the House Freedom Caucus) differ from Trump’s campaign promises in many ways—but that he thinks he can outmaneuver his boss.

Here’s how Mulvaney describes his budget-writing process, which culminated in a policy blueprint that would devastate Trump’s core supporters.

I laid to him the options that Mick Mulvaney would put on a piece of paper. And he looked at one and said, “What is that?” And I said, “Well, that’s a change to part of Social Security.” He said, “No. No.” He said, “I told people I wouldn’t change that when I ran. And I’m not going to change that. Take that off the list.” So I get a chance to be Mick Mulvaney. I get a chance to have those same principles. And I give ‘em to the president, and he makes the final decisions.

Mulvaney makes no effort to hide the fact that Trump’s policy knowledge is rudimentary, but tries to suggest that Trump knows where his red lines are and won’t knowingly cross them. Fortunately, as Mulvaney lets on, he can be fooled into crossing them!

First, Trump’s proposal to abolish the Appalachian Regional Commission.

[H]e probably didn’t know what the Appalachian Regional Commission did. I was able to convince him, “Mr. President, this is not an efficient use of the taxpayer dollars. This is not the best way to help the people in West Virginia.” He goes, “OK, that’s great. Is there a way to get those folks the money in a more efficient way?” And the answer is yes.

On persuading Trump to cut Social Security.

HARWOOD: I’ve had interviews with Republicans from Paul Ryan to John Thune who have been making the case that “we are going to persuade the president that we have to do something about entitlements.” How are you going to manage that?

MULVANEY: We’re working on it right now. He went through the list and said, “No, that’s Social Security. That violates my promise. Take that off. That’s Medicare. That violates my promise. Take that off.”

HARWOOD: Is Social Security Disability on that list?

MULVANEY: I don’t think we’ve settled yet.

On reviving Medicare privatization.

MULVANEY: My guess is the House will do either that or something similar to that.

HARWOOD: Because of his pledge, President Trump would veto it?

MULVANEY: That’s not a really conducive way to sort of maintain a relationship between the executive and the administrative branch. Let them pass that and let’s talk about it.

On using a debt limit increase as a vehicle for entitlement reform.

There’s a lot of entitlement reform other than just how old do you have to be to get your Social Security benefits.

I don’t assume Trump will fall for all of these tricks, and I definitely don’t assume the GOP Congress if functional enough to present Trump with promise-breaking bills that he can be fooled into signing. But to the extent that he ever had a chance to become a paradigm-shifting president, he blew it when he picked a bunch of ideologically orthodox conservatives, with grander commitments and ulterior motives to run his policy operation. They think he’s the sucker, and with good reason.

This is not how the Trump administration thought its first meeting with Vladimir Putin would go. To be fair, it’s not how anyone thought the Trump administration’s first meeting with Putin would go. Instead of meeting as chums—and possible allies in the war against ISIS—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Putin on Wednesday amidst heightened tensions, after the United States bombed Russia’s ally Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s sarin gas attack. The bombing, moreover, came less than a week after Tillerson signaled to Assad and Putin that the United States was effectively ceding Syria to Russia’s sphere of influence. The already incomprehensibly complex situation in Syria is now more incomprehensibly complex than ever.

Some wondered if the long-planned meeting between Tillerson and Putin would be canceled. But that was not the case—Tillerson met with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for nearly four hours before heading to the Kremlin to meet with the man himself. Sure, Putin on Wednesday essentially dared the United States to strike Syria again, but these meetings suggest that relations with Russia have not deteriorated to the extent that some people have claimed. Whether that’s a result of the overtures that Trump made during the campaign is anyone’s guess. After all, the last three U.S. presidents have pledged better relations with Russia and all three have been disappointed.

The Fox Business Network anchor on Wednesday gave a master class in how to butter up the president, who reciprocated by divulging intimate details of what it was like to order last week’s strike against a Syrian airfield. (“I will tell you, only because you’ve treated me so good for so long,” Trump said, making the transactional nature of the conversation explicit.) The press has already praised the beauty of the missiles raining down on Syria and informed us of Trump’s overwhelming compassion for Syria’s children, so Bartiromo had to dig a little deeper to unearth new information that would allow Trump to bask in this glorious moment a little longer. She homed in on his dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, which was when the strike was ordered.

Here is a breakdown of how Bartiromo got the goods.

1. Bartiromo: When you’re with the president of China, you’re launching these military strikes. Was that planned? How did that come about? Because right there you’re saying: A reminder, who the super power in the world is.

A perfect opening move. Trump is a notoriously insecure man, and it’s hard to imagine a more ego-stroking remark, one that sets Trump up as the big boy to Xi’s little wimp. Also, Bartiromo’s facial expression is at a 7 on the sycophancy scale.

2. Bartiromo: When did you tell him? Before dessert or? ...

It’s not the substance of the question so much as the schoolgirl giddiness with which she asks it. Facial expression at a 9 on the sycophancy scale.

3. Trump: We had finished dinner, we’re now having dessert, and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen [indicates size with hands: it’s a big cake], and President Xi was enjoying it, and I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded—what do you do? And we made a determination to do [it]. So the missiles were on the way. And I said, “Mr. President, let me explain something to you.” This is during dessert. “We’ve just fired 59 missiles,” all of which hit by the way, unbelievable, from hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing...

Bartiromo: Unmanned.

Trump: So incredible. It’s brilliant, it’s genius, our technology, our equipment, is better than anybody’s by a factor of five. What we have in terms of technology nobody can even come close to competing.

Trump’s digression about the chocolate cake is what has received the most attention this morning. But Bartiromo’s subtle goading allowed Trump to wax poetic about the military as if it were one of his hotels—the best, the biggest, etc.—which in turn allowed Trump to condemn Barack Obama for cutting defense spending and George W. Bush for invading Iraq. Also, yes, missiles are generally “unmanned.”

4. Trump: We’ve just launched 59 missiles, heading to Iraq.

Bartiromo: Well, you, ah, headed to Syria.

Trump: Yes, heading toward Syria.

This is the best part. Trump can remember the size of the chocolate cake he was eating and how good it felt to squeeze off a few missiles at the hazy area off the coast of his mind known as the Middle East, but he can’t remember the actual country he bombed. Bartiromo swooped in to help, but her face registered a 2 on the sycophancy scale.

5. Bartiromo: How did he react?

Again, it’s not the question itself, but the unctuous eagerness with which she asks it. A 10 on the scale.

6. Trump: He said to me, ‘Anybody that uses gasses’—you could almost say, ‘or anything else’—but anybody who was so brutal and uses gasses, to do that to young children and babies, it’s OK.

Bartiromo: He agreed.

Trump: He was OK with it.

Never mind the almost childlike use of the word “gasses” to describe chemical weapons. Never mind that strange aside “you could almost say, ‘or anything else,’” which seems to imply Trump believes retaliation is warranted whenever children are killed. We’re talking about Xi Jinping, whose government has tortured and imprisoned dissidents and repressed civil society groups. All hopes that China would move in a more liberal direction have been dashed under his rule. And Xi is the arbiter of whether a humanitarian strike is justified? But Bartiromo doesn’t question, she merely puts Trump’s word salad into a succinct phrase: “He agreed.”

The latest is Kevin Hassett, a tax expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who was tapped late last week to be the president’s chief economic advisor. Hassett has expressed support for a carbon tax, which is essentially a way to make polluters pay for the damage they cause to the global climate.

If confirmed by the Senate, Hassett would join a small but growing circle of Trump advisers who are annoying Steve Bannon with their support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through tax reform. Gary Cohn, director of the White House Economic Council, reportedly floated the idea, as did Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk when he was advising Trump. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also advocated for a national carbon tax policy while he was the CEO at Exxon Mobil.

But discussions of a carbon tax have so far not gone over well. A few weeks ago, an anonymous administration official told the Washington Post a carbon tax was being considered, which caused enough of a ruckus that a White House spokesperson flatly denied it hours later. But the rift in the White House between the carbon-tax moderates and right-wingers is apparently ongoing: Axios reported today that Bannon and his allies refer to Cohn in text messages as “CTC” (for “Carbon Tax Cohn”) or with an emoji: 🌎.

President Donald Trump told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo in a new interview that the Republican crusade against the Affordable Care Act continues unabated:

I think we’re doing very well on health care.  It’s been very much misreported that we failed with health care.  We haven’t failed, we’re negotiating and we continue to negotiate and we will save perhaps $900 billion.

Trump said he’d eventually move on to tax reform and infrastructure, but added, “I have to do health care first. I want to do it first to really do it right.”

The GOP’s inability to find consensus on the American Health Care Act last month—after seven years with repealing the Obamacare as their party’s top priority—was a stunning defeat for Trump and Republican lawmakers. To make matters worse, Trump responded to divisions within the Republican caucus by attacking the hardline Freedom Caucus, which he blamed for the unpopular bill’s defeat. 

Republicans have more than intra-party squabbles to worry about if they’re going to get anywhere on healthcare. After the AHCA failed, a Kaiser Health tracking poll found two-thirds of the public thought this was a “good thing.” Earlier this month, Gallup found the Affordable Care Act is supported by the majority of Americans for the first time since 2012. Trump himself continues to be unpopular, and Democrats have been buoyed by several unexpectedly competitive special elections in conservative districts, like the one Tuesday in Kansas.

Trump was warned that tackling healthcare first could be a nightmare. He could have begun with a big push for infrastructure, historically a bipartisan issue and one Trump clearly cares about. That would have put pressure on Democrats to compromise, and a victory would have given him real political capital to push orthodox Republican priorities. But Trump made the mistake of trusting House Speaker Paul Ryan, who insisted healthcare had to come first—a decision Trump reportedly regretted.

Now Trump is stuck. He’s got congressional leadership still fixated on healthcare, and he’s pledging not to let the issue go. But another attempt isn’t likely to fare any better, and a second major political failure will bruise Trump even more than the first.

Republican Ron Estes, the Republican candidate for CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s vacated Kansas House seat, survived a challenge by Democrat James Thompson. Despite taking place in a very red district—Pompeo had won by 31 points in 2014—the race was surprisingly tight and was framed as the first real test of post-Trump party strength for both Republicans, who ended up throwing a ton of resources into the race, and Democrats, who didn’t. Still, Estes only won by 7 points, a remarkable 24-point swing in two years. 

There are many provisos to this result, the most important being that it took place in Kansas. Its governor is the insanely unpopular Republican Sam Brownback, whose Ayn Rand-ian political experiment has transformed his state into a Rennaissance painting of hell. This election was as much a referendum on Brownback as it was on Trump. And Estes himself was a replacement-level Republican candidate at best—Republicans will have more interesting and inspiring candidates on their slate in 2018. 

Republicans will try to spin this as proof that things are not as bad as they seem. Here’s Trump himself floating the narrative that the Trumpian Republican Party is as strong as ever: 

While Republicans are certainly breathing a sigh of relief, this could not be further from the truth. The fundamentals of this election are terrible for Republicans. The lesson should be that very few districts are safe—as Tom Bonnier pointed out this morning, over 100 Republicans in the House are vulnerable to the kind of swing shown in Kansas. Independents are also leaning Democratic, making a winning coalition even harder. 

Thompson represented something new in Democratic politics, running as a pro-choice, economic populist son of Bernie Sanders. That he did so well in Kansas suggests that these policies have appeal. There will be many more such candidates in 2018, alongside more conventional pro-business candidates. (Jon Ossoff, who is running a surprisingly competitive race for Tom Price’s seat in Georgia, is one of these candidates.) Finally, Donald Trump intervened in Kansas and may have helped Estes. But in 2018 it seems increasingly likely that his help will be unwanted, as Barack Obama found in 2010. The one big difference is that Trump is likely going to be significantly less popular than Obama was then. 

One question mark for Democrats going forward is the role of the  Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which largely stayed out of the race. It’s possible that their involvement would have ended up hurting Thompson’s candidacy by chafing at his independent image, but they are receiving quite a bit of flack for staying out. Once again, the Democratic leadership was offered a symbolic opportunity to back an upstart, Bernie-affiliated candidate. Once again, they declined. 

By the standards of the Trump administration, it’s been a while since a damaging Russia story came out. The last time a news outlet reported on questionable contact between the Trump campaign/transition team/administration and Russian agents was a whopping nine days ago, when The Washington Post revealed that aspiring warlord Erik Prince of Blackwater fame had been sent to the Seychelles, which is apparently the Mos Eisley Cantina of archipelagos, to set up a back channel with the Russian government. The back channel was apparently designed to test Vladimir Putin’s willingness to abandon his Iranian allies and fulfill American neoconservatives’ long-standing goal of bombing Tehran or, if that’s off the table, Shiraz.

In the window between damaging Russia stories, Trump’s relationship with Russia got even messier. Bombing Syria, as Trump did on Friday after being shown pictures by his daughter, put a stop—at least for now—to the administration’s flirtatious dance with Moscow. After spending over a year praising Putin, Trump was risking war with the man he once publicly and pathetically said he wished would be his friend. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is currently in Moscow but it’s not clear what he’s there to do—that is as much a product of the confusion following the bombing of Syria as it is of the Trump administration’s completely incoherent foreign policy.

But just because the relationship between Trump and Russia has gotten more complicated doesn’t mean that the stories of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia are going anywhere. On Tuesday evening The Washington Post reported that Carter Page, who worked as a “foreign policy adviser” for the Trump campaign and had previously worked for a Russian bank, was being monitored by the FBI, which had acquired a FISA warrant, during the 2016 election.

As the Post noted in its report, this is by far the clearest evidence that members of the Trump campaign were in contact with Russian agents (or at least that the FBI had reason to believe that they were). The FISA warrant, moreover, has a 90-day expiration but was renewed more than once, suggesting that there was reason to keep monitoring Page.

Carter Page—seriously, just watch this guy try to explain himself—responded as only Carter Page could:

“This confirms all of my suspicions about unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance,” Page said in an interview Tuesday. “I have nothing to hide.” He compared surveillance of him to the eavesdropping that the FBI and Justice Department conducted against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

For sure, my man.

Speaking to Michael Goodwin of the New York Post, the president gave his controversial righthand man an endorsement that was less than ringing. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told the newspaper. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

Trump’s claim is, strictly speaking, untrue. Trump was consulting with Bannon long before Bannon became the campaign CEO in August of 2016. But this is how Trump deals with associates who later cause him problems. Sean Spicer has claimed that Paul Manafort played only a “limited role” in the campaign, after Manafort’s ties to Russian-friendly associates started to cause the Trump administration headaches. Manafort was, in fact, Trump’s campaign manager.

Bannon is now engaged in a fierce White House turf battle with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Which makes Trump’s comments all the more significant, since Kushner often uses the New York Post as an outlet for leaks. To date, Kushner has outlasted all his internal rivals, his family connection to Trump making him seemingly impervious to challenge. At the very least, Bannon should worry about Trump’s final comments to the Post: “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”

The consequences of axing Bannon could be serious. Breitbart, the media arm of Trump’s white nationalist base, would lose its mind. But this is how Trump has always operated: He leans on people until they’re no longer useful, then tosses them aside. As the longtime Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett told The New Republic in an interview before his death: “A guy like Steve Bannon ... I don’t know much about the guy, so I could be completely misunderstanding him, but I think that’s a guy Trump uses up quickly. That’ll be a body he steps over.”

As part of the budget package passed on Sunday by state lawmakers and backed by Cuomo, New York became the first state in the country to make public universities tuition-free for students whose families make under $100,000 per year. By 2018, the cap will be raised to $110,000, then $125,000 in 2019.

This is good news. But the details of the legislation have raised concerns from those who advocate for affordable education. NPR referred to these criticisms as “nitpicking,” while other outlets have focused on the “catch” that students live and work in the New York for a period of years after graduating to ensure that they’re contributing to the state economy. If they leave before the allotted time, say, to pursue a job in Connecticut or New Jersey, the Excelsior Scholarship grant will be converted into a loan, which they will be required to repay.

As Center for an Urban Future director Jonathan Bowles astutely summarized to Gothamist: “In a lot of upstate cities, there aren’t as many opportunities. And if someone is growing up in Buffalo—maybe they’re the first in their family to get a degree—why shouldn’t they consider a job offer in L.A. or Chicago?”

But even before the post-grad period, the plan includes provisions that have the potential to seriously hinder accessibility to some of the most vulnerable students it would purportedly serve.

One such provision is that students attend the university full-time and complete their degree in two or four years (depending on the program and subsequent degree). For a middle class student whose family can support their living expenses, the Excelsior Scholarship will certainly relieve the significant burden of tuition if they remain healthy and on course. For low-income students without family financial support, who still need to pay for their own housing, food, and costs of living in one of the most expensive states in the country, this presents a big obstacle. Those students will likely need to work to support themselves through their education, even with tuition removed as a factor, and working enough hours to earn a living wage while attending school full-time is incredibly difficult and exhausting. This will be an even greater challenge for students with children, who would need to support themselves, their children, and secure childcare while spending most of their time on the unpaid pursuit of their education.

Addressing the cost of tuition is only one part (though indubitably an important one) in making higher education accessible to a range of students with diverse needs and family structures. As free college becomes assimilated into the Democratic Party platform, those needs deserve consideration.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that students with disabilities would be required to attend school full-time we regret the error.