Welcome to This Week in Trump, Slate’s weekly look at Donald Trump’s presidency. Every week, we’ll catch you up on the events of the past seven days, point you to further reading, and keep an eye on the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed.

Evidence of Russian Ties

The FBI has found evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign. On Wednesday, CNN reported that U.S. officials told them the bureau has information indicating that Trump’s associates “communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

The information may pertain to onetime Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort—who, the Associated Press reported , had been engaged by a billionaire Putin ally in 2005 to influence politics in the U.S. and elsewhere. Manafort confirmed his work for the billionaire but said it wasn’t “inappropriate or nefarious.” The administration says Manafort “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time” in the campaign.

Wiretapping Accusations Debunked

In a tweet sent on March 4, the president accused his predecessor of wiretapping his communications. The consequences of that accusation continued to unspool this week. On March 16, press secretary Sean Spicer repeated a Fox News analyst’s claim that Obama had used the British intelligence service to conduct the eavesdropping. At Monday’s House intelligence hearing the head of the National Security Agency flatly rejected the idea, and the British government called it “utterly ridiculous.” Spicer insisted that “we were just passing on news reports,” and Trump, in a Friday afternoon press conference with Angela Merkel, also deflected responsibility: “You shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.”

The top Republican and Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee agreed there was no concrete evidence supporting Trump’s wiretapping charges. But committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes made a confusing statement to reporters on Wednesday afternoon that the intelligence community had “incidentally collected information” on people involved in the Trump campaign. Democrats criticized Nunes for sharing intelligence with the White House—which is under investigation—before briefing his fellow committee members. Nunes’ remarks prompted redoubled calls for an independent investigation of Trump’s Russia ties.

Tillerson’s Big Week

During a trip to Asia last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled a more aggressive approach to North Korea’s nuclear program. (It’s worth noting that presidents Obama and Bush gave similar warnings when they took office.)

On Monday, Reuters reported that Tillerson plans to skip what would be his first NATO meeting, set for April in Brussels, in favor of talks at Mar-a-Lago with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Tillerson will travel to Moscow soon afterward. The report feeds into worries about the American commitment to NATO in the face of an increasingly aggressive Russia. (NATO offered to reschedule.)

It marked a rocky start to Tillerson’s tenure at the State Department, which the administration has threatened with major cuts. In an interview with the only reporter invited on the Asia trip, a writer with the conservative website Independent Journal Review, he indicated he didn’t really want the job.

Also This Week

What to Read

In New York magazine, Olivia Nuzzi profiles Kellyanne Conway, who Nuzzi calls the most powerful woman in America:

She’s a chronic oversharer (one with top-secret security clearance) who will let you in on the most intimate details of her existence in casual conversation. She’s also pathologically social, her life a hamster wheel of meetings, briefings, appearances, interviews, events, and cocktail parties — something that separates her from someone like, say, [senior Trump adviser Steve] Bannon. “I have enough friends,” Bannon told me. “I’m not doing this to have friends.”

Writing for the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza argues that the White House’s falsehoods on Comey’s Russia testimony points to chaos at the highest level of the administration:

The larger takeaway from the White House’s spin is that the top people around Trump may have no idea how much exposure the President has on the issue of Russian collusion. … One of the reasons that Trump and the White House have been exuding a smokescreen of misinformation is because they are as clueless about what Comey knows as everyone else is.

This Week in @realDonaldTrump

Unusually, the president used the official @POTUS account this week—instead of his personal @realDonaldTrump account—to complain, accuse, and brag. From both accounts, he corrected the press about his (awkward) meeting with Merkel, while berating Germany and demanding reimbursement for U.S. contributions to NATO.

On Monday, during the House Intelligence Committee hearing, he cried out about fake news and leaks, while returning to the familiar argument that “the Russian story” is the Democrats’ excuse for losing the election

Final Take

On Friday, the White House’s daily email newsletter included a piece from Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri, headlined “Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why.”

Whoever chose the link probably hadn’t read the article itself:

Feed children just to feed them? What are we, SOFT? No. No we are not.

AMERICA WILL BE STRONGER THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN! Anyone who survives will be a gun covered in the fur of a rare mammal, capable of fighting disease with a single muscular flex. RAW POWER! HARD RAW POWER GRRRRRR HISSS POW!

It will be great.

(Here’s Petri’s follow-up: “How the White House Made Me Real News.”)