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Donald Trump made it clear at the beginning of his campaign that he wasn’t going to follow the normal rules or tone of politics. We’re keeping track of all the ways his presidency veers from the norm in terms of policy and rhetoric.

See updates from June here.

Donald Trump has been staffing his administration at a glacial pace. But new research from the New York Times confirms the president still hasn’t nominated anyone for 120 top positions 25 weeks into his term.

That means Trump has filled just 36 percent of the 188 key roles below the secretary-level ones that the Times is tracking. For comparison, Barack Obama had filled 78 percent in the same time frame.

While Trump’s pace is largely to blame, Senate Democrats’ blocking efforts, as well as recruiting problems, have also caused some delays. By the same point in Obama’s presidency, 126 of his nominees had been confirmed, while Trump has gotten in only 33. Trump, however, is only waiting on 14 more unconfirmed nominees than Obama was by this point.

For example, the leading role for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the National Hurricane Center, still doesn’t have a nominee. (And we’re already more than a month into hurricane season.)

Read the full Times report here.

President Trump’s team just can’t seem to get their stories straight about the “nothing” meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer claiming to have incriminating information on Hillary Clinton.

The latest defense of the meeting came Sunday when a member of the president’s legal team claimed there could be nothing troubling about the meeting because the Secret Service had vetted those in attendance.

“Well, I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in,” Jay Sekulow said on ABC’s “This Week”. “The President had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me.”

That was all very well, until the Secret Service piped up with a statement of their own, directly contradicting Sekulow’s version of events. “Donald Trump, Jr. was not a protectee of the USSS in June, 2016. Thus we would not have screened anyone he was meeting with at that time,” the statement said.

At the time of the meeting, then Republican nominee Donald Trump was under the protection of the Secret Service – meaning that if he’d attended the meeting himself, those he met would have been vetted.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN he was skeptical that the president would have had no knowledge of the meeting, saying: “The level of credibility from the senior level of this administration really is suspect.”

Since news broke about the meeting on June 8, the Trump administration has been attempting to get ahead of the story, claiming it did not prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Having initially denied ever meeting with any Russians, Trump Jr. has been forced to amend his version of events several times as more details of his meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya emerged. The latest update came Friday when it emerged a former Soviet counterintelligence officer and current Russian-American lobbyist also attended the meeting.

So much for transparency.

Donald Trump Jr. had to change his story yet again on Friday about his meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya during the presidential campaign last summer. A former Soviet counterintelligence officer and current Russian-American lobbyist also attended the meeting, according to NBC News.

The Associated Press identified the individual to be Rinat Akhmetshin, who told the news agency that the meeting was “not substantive” and he “actually expected more serious” discussion.

Emails at the time confirm that the June 2016 meeting of the Russians, Trump Jr., and senior Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner was convened with the purpose of cooperating with the Russian government to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

The president’s son’s descriptions of the meeting have changed repeatedly over the past week as journalists have released more details. First, the meeting was just about “adoption of Russian children” and “not a campaign issue.” Then he acknowledged that the meeting was also about obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton but that the lawyer “had no meaningful information.” And now we learn that there was at least one other Russia-aligned individual at the meeting that was previously undisclosed.

Trump Jr.’s lawyer confirmed that another Russian was also present. “The person was described as a friend of Emin [Agalarov]’s and maybe as a friend of Natalia’s,” Alan Futerfas, Trump Jr.’s attorney, told NBC News.

UPDATE 10:51 a.m.: Trump Jr.’s lawyer tells NBC News a translator was the sixth person who attended the June 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer.

Agalarov is a Russian pop star whose relationship with Donald Trump dates back to 2013 when Trump hosted his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Trump also appeared in a music video with Agalarov at the time.

Agalarov’s publicist, Rob Goldstone, brokered the 2016 meeting with promises of providing damaging information on Clinton’s ties to Russia. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. replied to an email from Goldstone.

On the day the new healthcare bill dropped, the president made a new proclamation that raises a serious question: Can political whiplash be a recurring condition?

Trump, after all, has promised and promised and promised to build a wall spanning the U.S.-Mexico border and that Mexico would pay for it. Then he said Mexico would pay the U.S. back for the wall. Now he says he doesn’t think there needs to be a full wall at all.

Trump told reporters Thursday that the wall along the border actually only needs to be about 700 to 900 miles long, according to BuzzFeed, since “mountains” and “violent and vicious” rivers can serve as natural barriers.

“It’s a 2,000-mile border, but you don’t need 2,000 miles of wall, because you have a lot of natural barriers: You have mountains. You have some rivers that are violent and vicious,” said Trump aboard Air Force One in a press conference that was initially off the record and retroactively placed on the record. “You have some areas that are so far away that you don’t really have people crossing. So you don’t need that.”

And despite the fact that he onced pledged that the wall needed to be made of concrete, Trump now says that the wall needs to be transparent, for when “they throw the large sacks of drugs over.”

“One of the things with the wall is, you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it,” Trump said. “As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over. As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall.”

“As crazy as that sounds” —  true.

“Watch your back, bitch,” Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz wrote in an email to a complete and total stranger on Wednesday evening, published by ProPublica Thursday.

The unidentified recipient of the threatening letter started the email conversation by urging Kasowitz to resign, following a news report that suggested the president’s lawyer could not obtain a security clearance because of his drinking problem. Though Kasowitz is representing President Trump in the expansive Russia probe, he says he has not requested security clearance, and does not expect to — a decision that may hamper the president’s legal defense.

Kasowitz responded to the stranger’s initial email four times.

“I’m on you now,” he wrote. “You are fucking with me now. Let’s see who you are. Watch your back, bitch.”

Then: “Call me. Don’t be afraid, you piece of shit. Stand up. If you don’t call, you’re just afraid.”

And later: “I already know where you live, I’m on you.  You might as well call me. You will see me. I promise.  Bro.”

The man on the receiving end of the emails reportedly told ProPublica that he was so worried about the emails that he sent them to the FBI, an agency Trump’s been having some issues with lately.

Update: Through a spokesperson, Kasowitz has apologized, blaming a “very long day.”

“You know, you’re in such good shape,” President Donald Trump remarked to the French first lady, after looking her up and down. “Beautiful.”

Trump’s commentary on Brigitte Macron’s appearance followed a tour of the museums at Les Invalides in Paris along with the French president and Melania Trump.

Trump arrived in Paris Thursday to celebrate Bastille Day.

There is no shortage of video showing Trump, before he became president, talking about women’s bodies and appearances like they were show ponies. Most recently, the president was sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, on the phone with the newly elected Irish prime minister, when a female reporter for an Irish news outlet caught his attention.

He interrupted his call with prime minister Leo Varadkar, pointed at the journalist Caitriona Perry, and beckoned her towards him. “And where are you from?” Trump said,. “Go ahead. Come here, come here. Where are you from? We have all of this beautiful Irish press.”

After Perry introduced herself, Trump resumed his call with Varadkar. “She has a nice smile on her face,” Trump said, “So I bet she treats you well.”

In explaining why they attended Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer on the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort have the same excuse: we didn’t read the email chain.

That’s according to Time Magazine and Politico, which have proffered similar accounts of why Kushner and Manafort attended a meeting ostensibly about the dirt the Russians could offer on Hillary Clinton. Time reported that an associate of Kushner’s said the presidential advisor and son-in-law of President Trump did not read to to the end of the chain where Trump Jr. was promised “information that would incriminate Hillary” from the Russians.

“It was on the fourth page of a forwarded conversation,” said a source familiar with Kushner’s knowledge told Time.

Politico reported pretty much the same excuse for Manafort: “a source close to Manafort said he did not read to the bottom of the email and didn’t know who specifically he would be meeting.”

So, two Trump campaign officials at the meeting now say they had no idea it was about before they decided to attend, a defense against the charge that the emails themselves show at least an attempt to collude with the Russians. That TL;DR excuse would be entirely plausible for the highly-visible subject line of the entire email chain: “FW: Russia – Clinton – private and confidential.”

“Everything is awesome.” That’s the mantra sung by the central character in the Lego Movie, despite living under the jackboot of the evil tyrant President Business. In the real world, President Trump is pushing a similar sentiment: “Everything is fantastic.”

That’s how Trump chose to describe the current mood inside the White House during an interview with Reuters published Wednesday evening. Trump said the administration was “functioning beautifully” – claiming some big wins since he took office including: “knocking the hell out of ISIS,” energy “doing levels that we’ve never done before,” and the stock market having “hit a new high.”

All-in-all, Trump said, “there’s not a thing that we’re not doing well in.”

Trump’s unique take on how well the White House is doing is admirably optimistic. In the wake of Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian meeting scandal which has dominated headlines for the last five days, the Washington Post reported Wednesday that the White House has been thrust into chaos – or as one insider called it, a “Category 5 hurricane.”

With leaks coming from every corner of the administration, those in the know are reporting an atmosphere of paranoia within the White House, to the point where staff are “engaged in a circular firing squad, anonymously blaming one another for the decisions of the last few days,” according to the New York Times.

Sing it now: “Everything is fantastic.”

A new lawsuit brought by Democrats against the Trump campaign and Roger Stone could open up a new, independent inquiry into Trump and his associates’ connections to Russia.

The suit, brought by a pair of Democratic donors and staffer from the Democratic National Committee, accuses the Trump campaign and Stone of conspiring to access their private information and expose it to the public, causing them personal grief.

Scott Comer, one of the plaintiffs and a former mid-level staffer at the DNC, claims the leaked emails outed him as gay judge to his grandparents, causing strain on his family and relationships. Two of the other plaintiffs, Democratic Party donors, Roy Cockrum and Eric Schoenberg, had their personal information leaked, including their home addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers.

If it moves forward, the case would turn into a new fact-finding inquiry into Trump’s campaign, this one led by a judge unaffiliated with the Trump administration.

Whatever troubles Trump has been having in the White House, the flow of government money straight into the coffers of his family’s private holdings is not one of them.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the State Department spent over $15,000 booking rooms for Trump’s family in February at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver. Members of the Trump family, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, were attending the opening of the hotel.

This was the first evidence of the State Department spending money on Trump hotels,  with other cases involving the Secret Service. Last February, Eric Trump racked up a bill of $97,830 in hotel rooms in Uruguay.

The findings were revealed in a Freedom of Information Request that was redacted in some parts, according to the Post.

The chief of the Office of Government Ethics in the White House — who quit last week — recently commented that there was “an appearance that the businesses are profiting from his occupying the presidency.”

This isn’t the first, or even tenth, time that President Trump’s hotel chain has benefitted from its namesake’s White House status. Last month, spending documents disclosed that Trump’s D.C. hotel received about $270,000 from Saudi Arabia, which purchased rooms, food, and parking as part of a lobbying effort against a bill that would make the country financially liable for 9/11.

As part of their probes into whether Donald  Trump’s campaign helped Russia put Trump in the White House, federal investigations are now reportedly trying to figure out whether members of the campaign literally told the Kremlin what to do.

Several unnamed sources familiar with the investigation told McClatchy that Congress and the Justice Department are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign, namely Jared Kushner,  gave Russian cyberoperatives the head’s up on which key voting jurisdictions showed weakness for Hillary Clinton and could be targeted with fake news.

Russia’s unprecedented attempt to swing the U.S. election in favor of Trump used trolls and bots to plant fake news stories, including the one that sparked the infamous Pizzagate scandal, to discredit Clinton. One source told McClatchy that Russia couldn’t have known where to sick the bots on its own.

And none other than Kushner, already under scrutiny for his business ties to Russia and reportedly trying to set up a secret back-door channel to Russia, headed the Trump campaign’s digital operations.

The probe is also investigating if the Trump campaign had any role in WikiLeaks’ release of the DNC’s hacked emails last October.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told McClatchy that he wanted his panel to determine whether “any exchange of information, any financial support funneled to organizations that were doing this kind of work” happened.

Sean Hannity was never likely to give Donald Trump Jr. a rough ride on his Fox News show Tuesday evening, just hours after the president’s son published emails that showed the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials — but even by Fox News standards, Trump Jr. had an extraordinarily easy time of it.

The president’s eldest son is at the center of a controversy that’s been raging for days, exploding Tuesday when Trump Jr. published emails relating to a meeting with a Russian government lawyer he took in the hope of securing information that might “incriminate Hillary.”

Opening the interview, Hannity said: “We will ask him every single question I can think of on this topic.” Just over 14 minutes later — which included several minutes of clips showing Democrats and the media criticizing Trump Jr. — Hannity declared: “Look, this is an opinion show, but I wanted to ask every question I could think of regarding this issue. I can’t think of any more, in all honesty.”

Despite a lack of hard-hitting questions, Trump Jr. did offer some new information during the interview, admitting: “In retrospect I would have done things a little differently.” He also revealed that he has “probably met with other people from Russia” — though Hannity failed to press him on who these people were  and what the meetings were about.

Trump Jr. said his father did not know about the meeting, because “it was just a nothing. There was nothing to tell.”

While Hannity chose not to criticize Don Jr., his treatment doesn’t line up with all the conservative outlets within News Corp. The New York Post, traditionally a flag-waver for Trump, said in an editorial Wednesday: “We see one truly solid takeaway from the story of the day: Donald Trump Jr. is an idiot.” The piece ended by calling him “criminally stupid.”

A House budget proposal for the construction of Trump’s border wall has been released. And surprise, surprise — America is paying for it.

The House Appropriations Committee released its spending bill Tuesday, which includes allocating $1.6 billion for a “physical barrier construction along the U.S. southern border” with Mexico.

The same legislation, which allocates American taxpayer dollars for the construction of the wall, which is not being paid for by Mexico, would cut funding to the Department of Transportation and several other domestic agencies.

“This funding bill provides the resources to begin building a wall along our southern border, enhance our existing border security infrastructure, hire more border patrol agents, and fund detention operations,” chairman of the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee, Rep. John Carter of Texas, said in a statement.

It’s a total reversal of Trump’s repeated campaign promises that Mexico would be funding the wall’s construction, including Trump’s own revision that America would be “paid back later” by Mexico.

Now, Republicans are proposing that the cost of the wall just be added to the Department of Homeland Security’s budget, a measure that Democrats — who have long protested government spending on the wall to the point of near-government shutdown — are expected to try to block once again.

The son of a Russian real estate mogul with ties to the Kremlin wakes up from a nap in a boardroom with Donald Trump at the head of the table. Trump lays into him for his weak performance like it’s an episode of “The Apprentice.”

“You’re just another pretty face,” Trump says. “I’m really tired of you. You’re fired!”

No, it’s not the latest scoop in the news cycle. It’s a music video from 2013.

Back then, Trump made a cameo for Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, the son of Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire who Vladimir Putin awarded the Order of Honor in 2013.

As it turns out, Emin’s publicist, a British-born music promoter and former tabloid journalist, is the same guy that brokered Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer in Trump Tower last June — at the request of Emin. Not only that but before the meeting, the publicist, Rob Goldstone, sent an email to Trump Jr. promising the meeting would yield damaging info on Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s candidacy.

After mounting pressure from both sides of the political aisle, Trump Jr. tweeted that he’s “happy” to meet with, at least, the Senate Intelligence Committee for its probe into Russian meddling in the U.S. election. That process will likely include scrutinizing Goldstone’s email as well as exploring the Trump family’s connections to the Agalarovs.

The two families have ties going back at least five years, when the Agalarovs paid Trump an estimated $20 million to host the then Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in a mall the Agalarovs owned in Russia. The family also planned to work with the Trump Organization to build a Trump tower in Russia before Trump’s victory in November halted the project.

The moguls are apparently still buddies, though. President Trump reportedly sent a handwritten thank-you note to the Agalarovs after they congratulated him on winning the presidency, and Aras has boasted about his access to the president.

“Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends,” Aras told Forbes.

Donald Trump Jr. knew his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton was part of a Russian government attempt to help his father win the presidency, the New York Times reported Monday, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.

The email, which specifically noted Russia’s interest in the 2016 presidential election, was sent by an entertainment publicist named Rob Goldstone, who reportedly helped arrange the meeting on behalf of his client, Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star, who said a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya had information on illegal donations to the DNC.

Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also present at the meeting.

Agalarov is familiar to the Trump family — his wealthy Moscow developer father, Aras Agalarov, sponsored Trump’s Miss USA pageant in 2013 and also tried, unsuccessfully, to work with Trump Jr. to bring a Trump Tower to Russia.

Goldstone initially denied having any knowledge of Russian government involvement, though the Times reports he stopped responding to questions after it obtained the text of the email. Trump Jr.’s new lawyer, Alan Futerfas, also denied the story.

”In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” Futerfas told the Times. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”

In a statement Sunday, Trump Jr. admitted he took the meeting with Veselnitskaya knowing it was about Clinton, but said that what Veselnitskaya ultimately provided was “vague, ambiguous and made no sense” and largely concerned the adoption of Russian children.

Trump had previously deemed reports of Russian influence in the election “disgusting” and “so phony.”

Investigations into the Trump campaign for possible collusion with the Russian government are still ongoing.

After Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit on Friday, a military ceasefire in southwestern Syria was announced that Trump soon hailed as a success. Which was news to the U.S. military.

Pentagon officials told BuzzFeed News that they have no official role in the ceasefire and have been given no guidance on how to enforce it. Previous ceasefires brokered during Syria’s horrific civil war have proven short-lived, and the U.S. military’s lack of involvement does not appear promising.

One senior State Department official involved in the talks told Reuters that further discussions are necessary to hash out details of the agreement.

“You’d think,” a U.S. military official told BuzzFeed News, “we would be a part of it.”

Under fire from all sides like, say, a “Top Gun” fighter pilot, Donald Trump Jr. said he’d be “happy” to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about his meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer in Trump Tower last June.

“Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” he tweeted.

After The New York Times reported Saturday that Trump Jr. met with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya because she promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called for Trump Jr. to meet with Congressional committee members. And they’re just one side of the ongoing investigation into whether Russia meddled in the U.S. election — and whether Trump campaign officials helped.

“Our intelligence committee needs to interview him and others who attended the meeting,” Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins told reporters Monday morning.

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, wants to go even further. He told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that he wants to “question everyone that was at that meeting about what was discussed.”

When news broke Saturday that Donald Trump Jr. had had a secretive meeting at Trump Tower last June with a Russian lawyer known for her connections to the Kremlin, he had an explanation: He was discussing policy related to the adoption of Russian children. The issue was apparently so important that Trump Jr. had then-campaign adviser Paul Manafort and do-everything son-in-law Jared Kushner attend the meeting.

But it turns out the reason Trump Jr. — EVP of the Trump Organization and regular purveyor of fear-mongering tweets — took the meeting was for something less charitable: dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

The New York Times, citing five White House advisers with knowledge of the meeting, reported Sunday that Trump Jr. met with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower on June 9 after being told she had damaging intel on Clinton.

In a comment to the Times on Sunday, Trump Jr. said he met with Veselnitskaya at the behest of an acquaintance and confirmed that she was offering negative intel on Mrs. Clinton, but that “it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said the meeting then turned to Russian adoption, maintaining that issue appeared to be Veselnitskaya’s “true agenda all along.”

Putin ended adoptions after President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act in 2012, which imposed sanctions against 44 Russians suspected of human rights abuses. Veselnitskaya has spent years fighting that law and discrediting its namesake, Sergei Magnitsky, who died mysteriously in a Russian prison after exposing corruption scandals under Putin’s rule. Veselnitskaya denies working on behalf of the Kremlin.

A spokesperson for Trump’s lawyer said President Trump “was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”

Update 7/10/17 9:00 a.m. ET: The Kremlin says it’s unaware of the meeting between Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya.

Despite the confusion about who admitted what and to whom during the president’s first official sit-down with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit Friday, rest assured that Trump’s going to get to the bottom of the 2016 election hacking. And he has just the right man for the job: Putin.

On Sunday morning, Trump tweeted confirmed that after confronting Putin over Russia’s role in the 2016 elections hack, the two world leaders discussed joining forces to form a cybersecurity unit.

By the end of the day, however, after a torrent of criticism on the Sunday shows from the likes of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Trump walked his plan back:

Donald Trump Jr. apparently shares his father’s affinity for violent CNN-related fan fiction.

A fierce defender of his father’s administration, Junior posted edited “Top Gun” footage depicting The Donald sitting in the cockpit of an aircraft shooting down a fighter jet bearing the CNN logo.

In the video, Trump mutters his catchphrase, “You’re fired,” before releasing a missile that makes the CNN logo dramatically explode. Trump Jr. shared the footage on both his Instagram and Twitter, labeling it “the best I’ve ever seen.”

Last week President Trump faced accusations of promoting violence against the media when he retweeted roughly edited WWE footage of himself pummeling a man whose faced was covered by the CNN logo. While CNN has reserved the right to release the identity of that video’s creator, “HanAssholeSolo” on Reddit, Trump Jr. retweeted the “Top Gun” clip from Twitter user “Old Row Official,” but its creator is currently unknown.

Trump won’t let it go. Meeting with Mexican President Peña Nieto at the G20 on Friday, Trump told reporters he “absolutely” still wants Mexico to pay for the border wall, one of his signature campaign promises.

One problem: Peña Nieto has said Mexico “absolutely” wouldn’t accept a proposal that “goes against our dignity as a country and our dignity as Mexicans,” such as “a wall that Mexico absolutely will not pay for,” The Guardian reported in January.

Soon after, Peña Nieto canceled a planned meeting with Trump in Washington, with Mexico’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, calling the wall “totally unacceptable,” according to CNN.

Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox has also flamed the project, joining with meme-fueled joke-stokers Super Deluxe to release a video criticizing the wall, which remains in funding limbo in Congress. “Donald, under no circumstances will we pay for this stupid, useless, racist, monument,” Fox says in the video.

Trump’s comments don’t come as a surprise to the Mexicans. Reuters cited a Mexican TV report saying that before Trump’s 30-minute meeting with Peña Nieto, Videgaray warned not to expect any big agreements to be made, noting, “We have to put it in context and not have expectations that are unjustified.”

Donald Trump had a busy morning in Hamburg gearing up for the G20 — with a flurry of Twitter posts. The president lashed out at the “Fake News” media, jabbed at Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, and singled out Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a person he was excited to meet at the important summit of world leaders, all before 9 a.m., and not focusing on the day’s pressing issues.

Just before his first face-to-face meeting with Putin and a number of the world’s most influential leaders, Trump hit some common themes, perhaps anticipating the scrutiny he’d receive in the press. “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!” Trump also tweeted that the “Fake News Media will never cover me accurately but who cares! We will #MAGA!”

The media will indeed be closely covering him to see what comes out of the meeting with Putin, as Trump has had a hard a hard time saying Russia interfered in the 2016 election, even though 17 intelligence agencies said it did.

Walter Shaub Jr., the head of the Office of Government Ethics since 2013, announced his resignation Thursday, claiming that “the ethics program needs to be stronger than it is.” He proceeded to give a blistering exit interview with CBS News, hours after he called it quits, saying President Trump appears to be profiting personally from the presidency.

“Do you think the president and his family are using the office to enrich themselves?” Julianna Goldman of CBS News asked.

“I can’t know what their intention is,” Schaub said. “I know that the effect is that there’s an appearance that the businesses are profiting from his occupying the presidency.”

The absence of real information creates at least the appearance of impropriety.  “Appearance matters as much as reality,” he said. “So even aside from whether or not that’s actually happening, we need to send a message to the world that the United States is gonna have the gold standard for an ethics program in government, which is what we’ve always had.”

But shouldn’t the Office of Government Ethics know if Trump or his associates actually are profiting from the presidency?

“You can’t be sure, and so it almost doesn’t matter whether they are profiting or not,” said Shaub. “America should have the right to know what the motivations of its leaders are, and they need to know that financial interests, personal financial interests, aren’t among them.”

Shaub said in an interview with the New York Times that, faced with an adversarial Trump administration and a weak ethics office, there was little that he could do in his role. The office, created by Congress in the wake of Watergate, has terms meant to overlap presidents to avoid politicization of the office.Shaub, whose term was to end in January, was nearly certain his term wouldn’t be renewed, so he’s leaving for an advocacy agency, where he thinks he can more effectively push for reforms that might strengthen the power of offices like the one he’s headed for the last four years.

President Donald Trump now has the opportunity to appoint a new head for the ethics office, which the White House said he would do “in short order.”

At a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, a day before he was set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump said Russia may have interfered in the U.S. election, though “other countries,” which he didn’t specify, could have been involved as well.

“Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows for sure,” he added.

Despite a rare consensus within the U.S. intelligence community that Russia did, in fact, interfere with the U.S. election (and an ongoing investigation into whether Trump campaign officials helped), the president has consistently denied that Russia did anything wrong and decried the probe as a “witch hunt.”

Oh, except for that one time he acknowledged Russia’s activity in a Twitter dig at President Obama.

The gender pay gap in President Donald Trump’s White House is even worse than the national gender pay gap was three decades ago.

After the White House released its annual report on the title and salary of every single White House Office staffer Friday, CNN quickly pointed out the stark difference between the average salaries: Women staffers make an average of $84,500 per year, while male staffers make an average of $105,000 per year. That’s about a 20 percent pay gap.

And that gap only increases when comparing median salaries, the more statistically accurate metric used by nearly all reports on pay differences. According to an analysis by Mark Perry, an economist at conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, women currently working at the White House earn a median salary of $72,650, while men make $115,000.

That’s almost a 37 percent pay difference — which is not only 20 percentage points worse than the national pay gap of 17 percent but also worse than the national pay gap back in 1980. It’s also far worse than the 12 percent pay gap between men and women in the Obama White House in 2013.

Perry, however, has an explanation for the pay difference that’s not much more comforting: Trump just isn’t hiring women to fill top positions.

“Of the top 101 highest-paid employees at the White House, nearly three out of four (73.3 percent) are men,” he writes in his report. “In contrast, of the 102 lowest-paid White House employees, nearly six out of 10 (59.2 percent) are female.”

We all know how much President Trump loves to tweet, and that he has a short attention span.

That’s why White House aides reportedly plan to prep the president for his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit on Friday in 140-character bites. They’ve written a list of “tweet-length sentences that summarize the main points” for the president, two unnamed U.S. officials told the Los Angeles Times.

This isn’t the first unusual tactic White House officials have used to encourage the president to read and retain information presented to him on complex scenarios. For example, National Security Council officials reportedly put Trump’s name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” one source told Reuters.

And Trump specifically asked for as many “killer visuals” as possible in his intelligence briefings, as CIA chief Mike Pompeo put it to the Washington Post.

Although White House aides are reportedly completely in the dark (and worried) about Trump will say to Putin, a number of sensitive topics could come up: U.S. military intervention in Syria,  sanctions against the Kremlin, and of course, the investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. election — and whether Trump campaign officials helped.

But at least Trump has had some practice distilling his thoughts on Russia.