And the recording is in the possession of the FBI, and this is how another week of this presidency ends—as crazy as it began. The week's highlights: Trump sides with Putin in opposing a US intelligence report that describes in great detail how the hostile power attacked the nation's democratic institutions. Next highlight: Trump explains that we, the public, did not understand what he really said when he said he supported Putin and not US intelligence—he really said he did not support Putin. And today, the last day of the business week, there is a report that Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen recorded "the two men... discussing a payment to a former Playboy model who has alleged an affair with Trump." Karen McDougal is her name. She must not be confused with Stormy Daniels, a former porn star who was arrested on July 11 for allegedly touching a patron in a sexual way during a performance in the Sirens Gentlemen's Club in Columbus. The conversation was recorded two months before the election.
"I can't believe Michael would do this to me," Trump is said to have said when he learned of the recording. "This country is so unreal right now," my brother said to me over the phone as I walked around the almost empty Convention Center bus stop. It closes tomorrow, July 21, but buses will still use it until March. After then, it will be a tunnel just for Link trains.
"This week. Just this week. No other president in the history of this country could have survived it. I mean, Trump still expects to have a job on Monday." At this point, I noticed an important aspect of the Convention Center's brutalist design that I had somehow forgotten (or maybe even never recognized). It continues, particularly in the northeast section, the concrete green gothicism of Lawrence Halprin's and Angela Danadjieva's Freeway Park. It's as if all of the forest-wild béton brut comes to an end here, at the bus station, which was opened in 1990 and will be destroyed next year.
"And over 70 percent of Republicans think he is strong on Russia. 70 percent think that Helsinki was great... You know, I once saw mother in a dream. And the thing that I loved about seeing her that way was, she was out of my body. This is what you miss when someone is dead. They are only in your body. But in your dreams, there is the illusion of them being outside again. Out there. In the world. And when I woke, I realized that this out-of-body illusion is what Trump is to his white base. These are some very ugly people. You know. Inside ugly. But it hurts like a stomach ache to have it inside all of them only. You also want to see how ugly you are out there. This is why they really need him. Who they are inside walks and talks like a dead person in a dream."
