He has hit a whole new level in recent days. On Thursday he denied that Russia was behind the 2016 election hacks, but waxed poetic about hackers who “are like artists” in the way they choose their targets depending on how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.” Putin continued, “If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions—which are right, from their point of view—to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia.” As my colleague Graham Vyse noted yesterday, this characterization undermines Trump’s longstanding argument, which is that Russia had no involvement in his election.

Megyn Kelly made her NBC News debut on Thursday by interviewing Putin. It was what you would expect from Kelly, who did not once ask Putin what race Santa Claus was and spent most of the interview making the amused yet condescending face that helped make her famous. Putin then took his trolling a step further.

“IP addresses can be invented, a child can do that! Your underage daughter could do that. That is not proof,” Putin said, referring to Kelly’s five-year-old daughter. More bizzarely, Putin also compared the accusations of Russian interference in the election to “anti-Semitism and blaming the Jews.” Asked about Trump’s decision to leave the Paris agreement, Putin quoted Bobby McFerrin, saying, “Don’t worry, be happy.”

Trump’s presidency so far has been the stuff of Putin’s wildest dreams. It seems unlikely that the Russians really thought that Trump would be elected, and instead hoped that their interference would damage Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy and standing. But in office, Trump has basically done exactly what Putin hoped. He has weakened the United States’s standing in the world and eroded relationships with key allies, particularly in Europe. In his interview with Kelly, Putin was spiking the football.

Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has been forced to cancel speeches in Seattle and at the University of California, San Diego due to violent threats from the right wing. As The Seattle Times reported on Thursday, the threats started after Fox News covered her May 30 commencement speech at Hampshire College. In it, she correctly called Donald Trump “a racist, sexist megalomaniac.”

“Since last Friday, I have received more than 50 hate-filled and threatening emails. Some of these emails have contained specific threats of violence, including murder,” she said in a May 31 statement. “I have been threatened with lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in my head.”

But Taylor’s crisis hasn’t received much attention outside local news. When Middlebury College students protested Charles Murray, pundits protested. As Osita Nwanevu noted at the time, a Washington Post column even compared his situation to that faced by the Little Rock Nine. See also: Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopolous.

There are some distinctions to note: Taylor is not being no-platformed in the sense that we commonly understand it, and the fervor she now fights developed in response to a campus speaking engagement to which no one objected at the time.

Nevertheless, it’s striking that her situation has garnered almost no outrage from the usual free-speech defenders. There are no columns in The New York Times or The Atlantic or New York magazine. There are no fevered tweets, no hand-wringing on her behalf. Instead, we have yet another Times column about the excesses of college liberals.

Taylor is inarguably in more danger than Charles Murray. She is a black person in a country with a long history of white supremacist violence—and in recent years that violence has been especially public. Just last month, a white supremacist stabbed two bystanders to death in Portland when they interfered with his racial abuse. Racism may also have motivated the May slaying of a black college student in Maryland.

Coverage of free speech fights in the U.S. casts the left as illiberal antagonists and lets the right off the hook for its own, much more serious history of censorship. By defending Charles Murray, and not Taylor, the media has shown some revealing inconsistencies in its concerns about free speech.

Among the seventeen candidates who ran in the Republican primaries, Lindsey Graham was an outlier on climate change. Unlike the eventual winner, Graham was happy to say climate change was real and man-made. Unlike most other candidates, Graham even said he would support measures to curb global warming. Graham has also been more willing than most elected Republican officials to challenge Trump on foreign policy issues.

So what was Graham’s response to Trump’s announcement that he would move to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement? This tweet:

This weak-sauce response illustrates why the entire Republican Party bears responsibility for this reckless, cynical move. Graham is nearly the best Republican on climate, and he’s not willing to challenge Trump. Furthermore, he peddles the fiction that Trump intends to “re-enter” the accord once the U.S. gets a “better deal.” This simply isn’t going to happen: The world is moving on, and the U.S. now enjoys the distinction of being a pariah state on this crucial global issue.

Trump is able to withdraw from Paris because his party is made up either of climate change deniers or cowards, like Graham, who claim to believe in climate change but are willing to appease deniers. Trump’s disastrous move is an indictment not only of his presidency, but also the party that has enabled and empowered him every step of the way.

When President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he’s withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, his biggest applause line was a shot at the French capital:

That was news to the Democrat actually elected to represent the city:

As PennLive reported earlier on Thursday, climate change will bring more flooding and hotter days to Pennsylvania. “Longer frost-free growing seasons and higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase yields for many crops during an average year,” the website reported. “But increasingly hot summers are likely to reduce yields of corn, Pennsylvania’s most important crop.” No wonder a poll last year found that 72 percent of Pittsburgh residents believe climate change is happening.

On Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, the international climate accord to limit global warming. “We’re following through on our commitments, and I don’t want anything to get in our way,” he said. “In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.”

Trump’s decision was a devastating blow to the planet, first and foremost, and also to environmentalists, corporations, the military, and U.S. allies, all of which had urged him to keep President Barack Obama’s promise to the world. It was a victory for ultra-conservatives, nationalists, fossil-fuel industries, and Trump himself, who fulfilled yet another one of his campaign pledges to favor polluters over the environment.

While Trump has failed to keep many of his “commitments”—there’s no wall, Obamacare is still in place, and China has not been labeled a currency manipulator—he is making good on his pledge to dismantle the individual facets of Obama’s environmental policies. In a May 2016 speech, he laid out his eight-part, 100-day “America First Energy Plan,”:

• We’re going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.
• We’re going to save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda.
• I’m going to ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline.
• We’re going to lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas
• We’re going to revoke policies that impose unwarranted restrictions on new drilling technologies. These technologies create millions of jobs with a smaller footprint than ever before.
• We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.
• Any regulation that is outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers, or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped. We will also eliminate duplication, provide regulatory certainty, and trust local officials and local residents.
• Any future regulation will go through a simple test: is this regulation good for the American worker? If it doesn’t pass this test, the rule will not be approved.

Trump is keeping his promise to “cancel” the Paris agreement, as well as his promise to cancel payments to the United Nations for global warming programs. In his speech Thursday, Trump said he would terminate all U.S. contributions to the Green Climate Fund, which exists under the 1992 international United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

While a few of Trump’s campaign promises would be nearly impossible to accomplish—“save the coal industry,” for instance—most of them have been met or are in the works. Trump lifted the moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands, and started the legal process of repealing rules limiting fracking on federal lands. He approved the Keystone XL pipeline. This week, his EPA halted regulations limiting methane pollution from oil and gas companies. Trump has not yet rescinded the Climate Action Plan or the Waters of the U.S. rule, a complicated legal undertaking that is likely to take years, but he has started that process by signing executive orders directing the EPA to eliminate both rules. With the anti-regulatory crusader Scott Pruitt at the helm of EPA, there’s little doubt that the agency will attempt to do exactly that.

The list above doesn’t even include every anti-environmental promise Trump made on the campaign trail. For instance, he pledged to “end the EPA intrusion” into Americans’ lives, and as president he proposed a 31 percent cut to the agency, the largest percentage cut for any department in his budget. Congress is unlikely to approve such a steep cut, but like the Paris deal, it’s proof that Trump was dead serious about dismantling America’s efforts to fight climate change.

Juxtapose this Russian embassy tweet from one week ago:

With this report from Wednesday:

The Trump administration is moving toward handing back to Russia two diplomatic compounds, near New York City and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, that its officials were ejected from in late December as punishment for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

President Barack Obama said Dec. 29 that the compounds were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes” and gave Russia 24 hours to vacate them. Separately, Obama expelled from the United States what he said were 35 Russian “intelligence operatives.” ... “We had no intention of ever giving them back,” a former senior Obama official said of the compounds.

These developments come just a few weeks after Trump invited the Russian ambassador and Russian foreign minister into the Oval Office for fairly naked Russian propaganda purposes because Russian President Vladimir Putin asked him to.

It calls to mind this recently unearthed, secretly recorded conversation between House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House GOP leaders last June:

McCarthy: “There’s two people, I think, Putin pays: [Representative Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” [Laughter] “Swear to god.”

Ryan: “This is an off the record…[laughter]…NO LEAKS…[laughter]…alright?! … [Laughter] … This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

He who pays the piper calls the tune, right? (Deny this article if asked.)

After previously saying his country had absolutely no involvement in cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign, Putin acknowledged on Thursday that “patriotically minded” private Russian citizens could have engaged in hacking. The New York Times reported that Putin is still denying Russian government involvement, even as American intelligence agencies concluded that Putin himself ordered an “influence campaign” to help elect Trump.

Putin’s heavy wink and nod doesn’t do Trump any favors. Trump has insisted that allegations that the Russian government helped tip the election in his favor—thereby calling the legitimacy of his victory into question—are overblown. He famously said the attacks could have been carried out by “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.’” Putin’s characterization of the hackers was much different, all but admitting that the hacks were done because Hillary Clinton was less friendly to Russia than Trump.

Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Mr. Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”

“If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions—which are right, from their point of view—to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia,” he added.

Putin’s remarks are bound to come up when the Senate Intelligence Committee resumes its hearings into possible collusion between the Russians and Trump’s campaign.

It’s been a week since the Congressional Budget Office dropped its score of Trumpcare, which means it’s been a week since it became abundantly clear, not for the first time, that the GOP’s attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare would cost millions of people their health insurance, cause premiums and deductibles to skyrocket, and disproportionately hurt the poor and the sick—all in order to give rich people a massive tax cut.

Republicans knew this was coming, but their response has been weak. They’ve done little to counter the actual claims in the CBO report. Instead, they’ve shrugged their shoulders, looked at the ground, and mumbled, “The CBO gets things wrong, y’know.” Which is exactly what they did when the CBO scored the first version of Trumpcare.

But on Wednesday, Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, took things a step further, arguing that there were Hillary moles inside the nonpartisan CBO. “At some point, you’ve got to ask yourself, has the day of the CBO come and gone?” Mulvaney told The Washington Examiner. “How much power do we give to the CBO under the 1974 Budget Act? We’re hearing now that the person in charge of the Affordable Health Care Act methodology is an alum of the Hillarycare program in the 1990s who was brought in by Democrats to score the ACA.”

Even for the Trump administration this is astonishingly brazen, cynical, and stupid. Mulvaney is trying to cast suspicion on Heather Harvey, who had worked in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration and currently heads the CBO’s health analysis division. That is quite a stretch, especially when you consider that the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, handpicked the CBO’s current director Keith Hall. It all gets more absurd when you remember that Donald Trump repeatedly cited CBO reports when criticizing the Obama administration. And it gets even more absurd when you remember that Mulvaney made a $2 trillion accounting error in his own budget.

This might be a new level of cynicism for the Trump administration, which has repeatedly trashed nonpartisan agencies. But really, it is the only card Mulvaney and Trump have to play.

Farage, the low-rent British Trump and real-life Alan Partridge, spent his post-Brexit victory lap cozying up to Donald Trump and other faux American populists. Farage is a remarkably transparent opportunist, and he saw a branding opportunity to go from “smarmy guy drinking alone in a pub” to “figurehead of a worldwide populist movement.” He attended the RNC in July and appeared to be in regular contact with the Trump campaign. And shortly after his victory, Trump called for Prime Minister Theresa May to appoint Farage ambassador to the U.S.

In other words, he’s been an active social networker over the past year. Unsurprisingly, that seems to have ensnared him in the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Farage is now a “person of interest” in the FBI’s probe, which has seemed inevitable ever since he was caught leaving the Ecuadorian embassay in London, where Julian Assange resides. Asked by BuzzFeed what he was doing there, Farage said he couldn’t remember.

According to the Guardian, “Sources with knowledge of the investigation said the former UKIP leader had raised the interest of FBI investigators because of his relationships with individuals connected to both the Trump campaign and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whom Farage visited in March.” Farage, for his part, has mimicked Trump’s own response to the FBI’s investigation, saying that his cameo is proof of the “hysterical” effort to avoid coming to terms with Brexit and Trump’s election victory.

Farage may be the Zelig of the Russia investigation—the rare individual who’s connected to nearly all of the parties involved. “If you triangulate Russia, WikiLeaks, Assange, and Trump associates, the person who comes up with the most hits is Nigel Farage,” one person told the Guardian.