Donald Trump has spent a significant portion of the past two and a half years soothing his deeply fragile ego by insisting he would have beaten Hillary Clinton in the popular vote if not for rampant fraud. His argument has typically centered around the repeatedly discredited claim that “millions of people” voted illegally in the 2016 election, which he formed and then disbanded a presidential commission to investigate. On Monday, though, he proffered a new theory for why Clinton kicked his extremely sensitive ass by nearly 3 million votes:

As is typically the case, no one knows precisely what the president of the United States is talking about. Presumably this tweet is a product of his tendency to pick up various threads of information from unreliable sources, let them rattle around in his head for a bit, and then spit out something incomprehensible to those who don’t speak Trump. Seven minutes prior to the tweet, Fox Business aired a segment discussing congressional testimony from psychologist Robert Epstein. In June, Epstein told Ted Cruz that Google’s bias had likely resulted in at least 2.6 million undecideds voting for Clinton, and that in 2020, Big Tech could band together and throw an extra 15 million-odd votes toward whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be. As TechCrunch notes, Epstein puts out “anti-Google editorials almost monthly,” and has been attacking the company since 2012, when Google helpfully warned visitors to Epstein’s website that it had been hacked to serve malware to anyone reading it. And, as Mother Jones writes, there’s good reason to ignore not just the president, but the quack whose extremely unscientific work he seemingly attempting to reference on Monday:

...where does Epstein get those numbers? This is a bit murky, but a couple of years ago he published a paper showing that search results can bias decision-making. The limits of the paper are so breathtaking that I’m not sure how you can draw any real-world conclusions from it, but basically he came to the unsurprising conclusion that if you (a) give people a choice of two politicians they’ve never heard of and (b) provide search results that are unanimously positive toward one and negative toward the other, then (c) they’ll tend to support the person who got the positive results. No kidding.

In April, Epstein presented another study in which he argued that Google’s algorithms are biased because their search results are dominated by news from mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, rather than conservative sites like Breitbart. In other words, Epstein’s basis for saying Google is biased is that it gives more weight to legitimate new sources and less to the since abandoned love child of Steve Bannon and erstwhile Trump sugar daddy Robert Mercer. Using this theory, Epstein tracked “47,300 searches by dozens of undecided voters in the districts of newly elected Democratic Reps. Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin,” and then claimed that an estimated “35,455 voters who were on the fence were persuaded to vote for a Democrat entirely because of the sources Google fed them.” Yes, people read stories from news outlets that have never had an entire section called “black crime,” and made a decision based on those stories. Or, as Epstein would put it, they were manipulated into voting for a Democrat by Google, a move the site may pull again in 2020.

That’s obvious catnip to our conspiracy theorist president, but most people aren’t buying it, including Clinton herself:

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Corporate America announces it will now take employees’ well-being into account

This would be a marked shift from maximizing shareholder value at all costs:

Jamie Dimon and other leaders at some of the world’s largest companies said they plan to abandon the long-held view that shareholders’ interests should come first amid growing public discontent over income inequality and the burgeoning cost of health care and higher education. The purpose of a corporation is to serve all of its constituents, including employees, customers, investors and society at large, the Business Roundtable said Monday in a statement. Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., heads the group.

The 181 signatories include BlackRock Inc.’s Laurence Fink, Bank of New York Mellon Corp.’s Charlie Scharf, and the CEOs of several Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and Moelis & Co. It also includes Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person.

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” the group said in the statement. “Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity.” Suddenly caring about rank-and-file employees would constitute a massive change for much of corporate America but particularly for Amazon which reportedly treats its warehouse workers “like robots” and has been described by one former employee as an “existential sh-thole.”

The axis of evil unites

Jared and Ivanka have found a third:

Former vice president Dick Cheney…[is to] appear at a lunch fund-raiser Monday in support of President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee, according to an invitation to the event. The luncheon fund-raiser in Jackson, Wyo., will feature White House advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, along with acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as “special guests,” according to the invitation, which was obtained by the Washington Post. The invitation does not list the official titles of Mulvaney and the president’s daughter and son-in-law, and it clarifies that “their participation in the event is not a solicitation of funds.”

Of course, that‘s exactly what the purpose of the fund-raiser that they are attending is, but as the old saying goes, “Rules that other people should apparently be thrown in prison for violating are made to be broken by Trumps.”

Global investment bank, mulling job cuts, offers employees interesting list of suggested summer reads

The books start at the 4th grade reading level and include a novel about a woman who finds herself after quitting her soul-sucking job in banking:

UBS Investment Bank recently emailed out its second annual reading list to its bankers. This year’s list revolved around the theme of “change,” and includes books ranging from Charlotte’s Web to a history of a 19th-century naval battle. UBS Investment Bank is reportedly considering laying off hundreds of employees, as its heads consider how to deal with a rough first half of 2019…Sam Kendall, head of corporate client solutions for the Americas at UBS and the list's author, said the original compilation was a long list of reads he wanted workers to keep handy when they needed to reflect on changes or transitions.

In addition Charlotte’s Web, Kendall recommends Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts and Breathe In, Cash Out, the latter of which is “a story about a Wall Street banking analyst who plans to quit her job the minute her bonus hits the bank account to follow her real passion of becoming a yoga instructor.” Per Kendall, “the lesson here is to do something you are passionate about.” According to Bloomberg, UBS’s co-heads of investment banking are currently considering an overhaul of the business that could include hundreds of job cuts, so some people may need to find something they’re passionate about sooner than they had planned.

Trump is still talking about slapping tariffs on French wine

The president reportedly mentioned the threat at Stephen Ross’s big fund-raiser in the Hamptons, the same one where he called Don Jr. is his “expert” on gun control. According to Bloomberg, the president “suggested he might impose a 100% tariff on French wine to retaliate for President Emmanuel Macron’s tax on multinational technology companies,” which follows a July statement, if a Twitter tantrum can be described as such a thing, that he was working on “substantial reciprocal action on Macron’s foolishness.” The famous teetotaler then added, “I’ve always said American wine is better than French wine!”

Elsewhere!

White House officials eyeing payroll tax cut in effort to reverse weakening economy (Washington Post)

SoftBank to Lend Founder and Employees Billions to Invest in Fund (WSJ)

Jeffrey Epstein’s Will Leaves $577 Million to Mysterious Trust (The Daily Beast)

This woman implanted her Tesla Model 3's valet key into her arm (Road Show)

“We are still trying to recover from a colonization period of almost 300 years,” she said. “Then there is this white dude in the States who’s talking about purchasing us.” (WSJ)

“He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” (New Yorker)

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