And in case anyone had trouble reading between the lines, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers chair, spelled it out a bit more clearly in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, telling the paper: “The stagnation of America’s middle class in the wake of the recession is much worse than believed, and government policy under President Obama should share some of the blame. One explanation for this historical slowdown is that Obama’s tax and transfer policies worsened the wound.” (To make it seem like this isn’t yet another instance of Trump being completely and totally obsessed with Obama, Hassett noted that the report was critical of other administrations, as well, saying trade deals of the last few decades were “filled with concessions that relatively feckless negotiators of the past made to our trading partners.”)

Evidence that the president spends a good portion of his waking hours preoccupied with Obama aside, economic advisers under 44 were most annoyed by the fact that the actual data exposes the thesis that Obama destroyed economic growth as utter bullshit. “Under the previous administration, we went from the worst downturn of our lifetimes to the second longest expansion on record,” Austan Goolsbee, C.E.A. chairman from 2010 to 2011 and an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, told me. “The Trump administration inherited an unemployment rate in the 4s and thinks they hit a triple.” Alan Krueger, another Obama-era C.E.A. chairman and current Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton, added: “The Trump administration . . . should do their best to maintain the economic expansion that started six months into President Obama’s first term. [They] should wake up every morning and thank President Obama for leaving the economy in good shape, without unsustainable bubbles, and with the federal deficit under control.”

Somehow, we’re guessing that’s less likely to happen than Trump is to angrily tweet “I’ve hosted so many more reality-TV shows than Obama!” one morning in the not too distant future.

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Did Paul Manafort promise a Chicago banker a White House job in exchange for home loans?

Robert Mueller would certainly like to know:

Manafort received three separate loans in December 2016 and January 2017 [totaling $16 million] from Federal Savings Bank for homes in New York City, Virginia, and the Hamptons.

The banker, Stephen Calk, president of the Federal Savings Bank, was announced as a member of candidate Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers in August 2016.