Berman: “Are you saying Gary Cohn faked a bad connection to get the president off the phone?”

Carper: “Well, I wouldn’t—I don’t want to throw him under the bus, but yes.”

It's these sorts of episodes that presumably leave Cohn reevaluating his life and the choices that led him to this point. This was the same phone call in which Trump told the group that his accountant claimed he was going to ”get killed on this bill,” and that “the deal is so bad for rich people, I had to throw in the estate tax to just give them something.” The only way this story could get better is if we learned Cohn had blown a hair-dryer into the receiver and yelled, “Sorry, Mr. President, we’re going through a tunnel!”

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Now he’s done it: The Wall Street Journal editorial board is pissed at Trump

As a former longtime editor of The Wall Street Journal told my colleague Joe Pompeo last month, “The editorial page has been doing crazy shit for a long time,” meaning that since time immemorial, the paper’s editorial board has spouted off such right-wing views that their newsroom colleagues seem like bleeding-heart liberals by comparison. Recently, however, the board’s positions have risen to new heights of conservatism, with an op-ed claiming that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia “threaten[s] the rule of law,” and another telling Trump to “immediately [issue] a blanket presidential pardon to anyone involved in supposed collusion.”

But with the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger—a move that, if not directed by the president, is certainly endorsed by him—the editorial board appears to have reached its breaking point. “Does President Trump’s right hand know what his left is doing?” it fumed late Tuesday night. “The lawsuit misconstrues markets and undermines the rule of law—whether or not it was inspired by the White House.” The piece also chastises Trump for saying on Tuesday that the proposed deal was “not good for the country,” adding that “uttering his opinion feeds inferences of political interference and a willingness to bend anti-trust law in ways that undermine business confidence.”

Elsewhere in C.E.O.s losing their temper with the C.E.O. president, Aryeh Bourkoff, founder of investment bank LionTree and an adviser on media deals, told The New York Times in what we can only imagine was his sternest tone that “government opposition to mergers” has “created a heightened level of uncertainty in the deal environment.”

The Senate’s tax bill might actually pass

Though it remains wildly unpopular with large swaths of America, the Senate’s tax bill got a boost on Tuesday when Senator Lisa Murkowski wrote in an opinion piece in Alaska’s Daily News-Miner that “the federal government should not force anyone to buy something they do not wish to buy,” seemingly endorsing the scrapping of Obamacare’s individual mandate; over the summer, she was one of three senators who jettisoned Republicans’ dreams of repealing the Affordable Care Act over the mandate issue.