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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.

Day 218 Aug 25

Pence’s military detail in Colombia got busted for a booty call

A group of soldiers assigned to Mike Pence’s communication team in Colombia were relieved of their duty after they were caught on camera bringing women back to their hotel room, according to NBC.

Sound familiar? It’s because we’ve heard something like it before. In 2012, nine Secret Service agents on presidential detail in Colombia were busted for bringing prostitutes back to their hotel, resulting in one of the biggest scandals to hit the beleaguered agency in recent years. And back in April, a Secret Service agent on Pence’s detail was suspended after he was caught meeting a prostitute in a Maryland hotel room, CNN reported.

This time around, there’s no indication of any illegal activities like prostitution; NBC said the problem was that the soldiers did not register the women before bringing them into a secure area. But it was a big enough deal for the Army — as well as Pence, who famously will not dine with any woman who is not his wife — that the men were sent home in disgrace.

“We are aware of the incident and it is currently under investigation,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Haverstick told NBC. “We can confirm that the individuals in question have been reassigned back to the Army.”

“We are aware of the incident and it is currently under investigation,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Haverstick told NBC. “We can confirm that the individuals in question have been reassigned back to the Army.”

Trump’s chief of staff won’t let him read InfoWars anymore

No more crazy stories from InfoWars or Charles C. Johnson in the president’s media diet. Anything that gets to Trump’s desk will now be vetted carefully, as part of Chief of Staff John Kelly’s effort to impose order on the flow of information to the Oval Office.

Kelly is reportedly limiting Trump’s ability to read news from the far-right, conspiracy-theory-peddling website run by Alex Jones, according to Axios. (At press time, the second-most-read story on InfoWars, according to the site, was headlined “Is This Final Proof Michelle Obama Is A Man?”)

Trump rarely surfs the web himself, preferring to read on paper, so he rarely comes across news stories on his own. But in the days before Kelly took over, staffers would sneak stories onto his desk — including reports from internet provocateurs like Charles C. Johnson — according to Politico. Reince Preibus tried to put a system in place to track what crossed the president’s desk — an attempt to comply with record-keeping laws — but staff found ways around it.

And Trump’s had a cozy relationship with InfoWars. On Tuesday, the notorious former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeared on InfoWars, where he thanked Jones for “for bringing this story out and reaching the president,” implying that the site helped him earn the presidential pardon that Trump’s been hinting at. Jones claims that Trump called him to thank him after winning the election — a claim that the White House never refuted. Trump’s reelection campaign also linked to an InfoWars piece about crowd size in an email to supporters in June.

These kinds of reports, Politico says, could derail Trump’s agenda, cause meetings to be canceled, and lead to the president maniacally searching for the source of a leak.

During the day, staff will now have trouble getting information directly to Trump. But the president still loves his phone and cable news: After-hours phone calls might continue to have the same effect as did the printed-out fake news stories, secretly dropped on the Resolute Desk.

Gary Cohn is “distressed” over Trump’s neo-Nazi response but won’t quit

Trump's economic advisor Gary Cohn (L) reacts to the president's first public comments about Charlottesville.

Gary Cohn, President Donald Trump’s economic adviser, said he was close to quitting after the Trump’s remarks about the protests in Charlottesville. He’s urging Trump to do more to condemn Neo-Nazis.

“Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK,” Cohn said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I believe this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities.”

He said he’s come under enormous pressure both to resign and to stay in his position, and ultimately decided to stay.

“As a patriotic American, I am reluctant to leave my post as director of the National Economic Council because I feel a duty to fulfil my commitment to work on behalf of the American people,” he said, adding, “But I also feel compelled to voice my distress over the events of the last two weeks.”

Very few top White House advisors have ever publicly criticized comments from a president. Even fewer have ever publicly stated that they considered resigning.

Day 216 Aug 23

Mar-a-Lago is paying for Trump’s Charlottesville comments

At least 18 charities have cancelled their plans to hold events at Donald Trump’s private club Mar-a-Lago following his incendiary comments on the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

Not all of the charities — which include the Red Cross, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and the Salvation Army — publicly cited politics, or even any reason at all, for their abrupt departure. Many had been holding events at the Palm Beach, Florida club for years — some of the club’s biggest money makers.

The loss of one of the latest charities to cancel, the Bethesda Hospital Foundation, will likely hit Mar-a-Lago hard: In 2015, the charity spent about $95,000 in total on the event, dwarfing most of the other charities that spent anywhere between $25,000 and $40,000. On Monday, a local chapter of United Way also canceled a reception scheduled for the Trump National Golf Club in Teaneck, New Jersey, citing the events in Charlottesville.

Other Trump properties have already been suffering under President Trump — the revenue of the Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in the Bronx dropped 12 percent between June 2016 and June 2017.

And the Trump’s Los Angeles golf course is, one golfer told the Washington Post, now “just dead all the time.” Revenues for its green fees have dropped 13 percent since Trump started campaigning for president in June 2015, charity golf tournaments have largely left. and Hollywood productions appear to be staying away. As of July, zero weddings have been held at the venue — down from the course’s yearly average of 17.

Nearby golf courses, meanwhile, have seen an uptick in business.

Trump aide’s email reportedly detailed offer for campaign to meet with Russia

President Donald Trump’s current deputy chief of staff sent an email referencing an effort to get Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin together for a meeting in what appears to be yet more evidence of Russia’s attempts to ingratiate itself with the Trump campaign, CNN reported Wednesday.

Rick Dearborn, who sent the email, had not been previously publicly linked to the federal investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Sources with “direct knowledge of the matter” tell CNN that someone identified only as “WV” in Dearborn’s email wanted to set up the meeting between Putin and the Trump campaign.

It’s not clear if that meeting ever actually happened, or what its purpose was. Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos reportedly also sought to set up a meeting with Russians, but campaign officials seemed to have brushed his requests off.

Dearborn’s email was reportedly sent in July 2016, around the same time that Trump’s son Don Jr. Trump met with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer in order to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Dearborn did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment, and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment.

Trump seems to think you can just “clean” coal

President Donald Trump reacts to the song as he arrives at a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Donald Trump appears to think that you can “clean” coal.

“We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal, and it’s just been announced that a second, brand-new coal mine, where they’re going to take out clean coal,” he said at a campaign rally in Phoenix just seven months in his presidency. “They’re taking out coal, they’re going to clean it.”

Despite the president’s excitement, scrubbing coal down before it’s burned — or whatever Trump was implying makes coal cleaner — isn’t how clean coal works. In fact, the concept of clean coal is pretty bogus.

In 2008, the American Council for Clean Coal Electricity spent $40 million to make “clean coal” a household term. And Democrats and Republicans alike bought into it. They started to peddle the idea as a shortcut to a greener economy while continuing to promote using the vast stores of cheap, American coal.

But if clean coal worked at all, it would, in theory, work by either turning solid coal into a gas by applying heat and pressure, in a steamy, oxygen-rich environment or by trying to trap carbon from power plant exhaust.

Either way, though, the technology is still underdeveloped and ineffective, at least for now. Even the Department of Energy’s website concedes that “these technologies are not ready for widespread deployment on fossil fuel based power plants.”

Day 215 Aug 22

Trump and McConnell reportedly giving each other the silent treatment

President Donald Trump is reportedly no longer on speaking terms with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of his two top lieutenants in Congress — according to the New York Times, the two men haven’t talked in weeks.

Even at the best of times, Trump and McConnell were uneasy bedfellows. McConnell endorsed him in the 2016 presidential election, but only after Trump had all but won the Republican nomination, saying in a terse statement, “I have committed to supporting the nominee chosen by Republican voters.”

Things only worsened once the Republican healthcare plan tanked. Trump attacked McConnell in a series of tweets, blaming him for its failure, and a phone call between the two devolved into “a profane shouting match,” the Times reports.

Trump’s comments last week on the violence in Charlottesville, where he called white supremacists “very fine people,” also didn’t help the growing tension.

“I think he’s going to blow up, self-implode,” Al Hoffman, the former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the Times of Trump. “I wouldn’t be surprised if McConnell pulls back his support of Trump and tries to go it alone.”

Photo of Afghan women in miniskirts reportedly helped flip Trump on war

President Donald Trump speaks at Fort Myer in Arlington Va., Monday, Aug. 21, 2017.

When National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster needed to convince Donald Trump to send more troops to Afghanistan, he reportedly pulled out the big guns: “a black-and-white snapshot from 1972 of Afghan women in miniskirts walking through Kabul, to show him that Western norms had existed there before and could return,” according to the Washington Post.

The Post reports that McMaster’s photo, and other warnings from Secretary of Defense James Mattis and newly installed Chief of Staff John Kelly (both former generals), persuaded Trump that the fight in Afghanistan was not “hopeless.”

Prior to taking office, Trump repeatedly denigrated the U.S. fight in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, calling it a “complete waste.”

Day 214 Aug 21

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, fourth from left, poses for a photo with family members on the NBC "Today" television program, in New York, Thursday, April 21, 2016.

Trump and his kids are blowing through the Secret Service’s budget

The Secret Service is struggling to pay its agents for round-the-clock security for President Donald Trump’s numerous residences and his large family.

After just seven months of the Trump presidency, more than 1,000 agents have already hit the federally mandated caps for annual salary and overtime pay, Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles told USA Today.

Alles attributes the increased workload to Trump’s large family, compared to that of previous presidents, whom by law the Secret Service must protect. During the Obama administration, 31 individuals required Secret Service protection, compared to 42 under Trump.

“The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,” Alles told USA Today. “I can’t change that. I have no flexibility.”

Most of Trump’s children are also adults and often travel overseas for work, which requires Secret Service protection too. And Trump’s frequent jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, the so-called “Winter White House,” or most recently, his vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, also hit the agency right in the pocketbook.

The squeeze is so dire that Alles has started approaching members of Congress to look into whether they could increase the annual budget covering salary and overtime for agents from $160,000 to $187,000 — a nearly 17 percent bump.