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Hello and welcome to Trumpcast. I'm Virginia Heffernan. Rough week. Paris was burning. Trump was a psycho, calm about it.

Trump is still president. New York's daily broadsheet is still quoting the DNC's hacked emails. The bar report tomorrow is expected to be a reduction of justice that hands more talking points to Trumpworld.

And Monday was tax day. And I'm feeling sorry for myself as a violin. Please single mom of two with three jobs on the hook for $17,000 more than I was last year.

Putta! What a week. Thus I bring you Dahlia Lithwick. She's my light in the storm. Is that what it's called my port in the storm?

Dahlia is the host of Slate's Amicus as she taught me to pronounce it. And a veteran senior writer for Slate. She is at work on a book about women and the law called Lady Justice.

Dahlia, welcome to Trumpcast. Thank you for having me back. You and I usually try to keep it up beat, but I almost don't want to dry today. I just feel so bleak.

I feel there's a groundhog day quality where you get excited for these drip drips and then they just turn out to be drip drips. And you know the notion that something dispositive and determinative and you know that will change hearts in mind.

Yes. It's no longer you know it's just not going to be that. And so that I think that that's some of the bleakness is just knowing that this is just a Rorschach test that is going to confirm everybody's pre-existing ideas and that Fox News I could write the headline right now.

I mean, I'm pleased in total exoneration. You mean you're talking about the bill bars reduction of justice. I already think it's a reduction of justice and another another entry and obstruction. It's just why bother calling it anything else.

Well, I mean, and I think interestingly we're going to try like that I think there's something so profound in meta Virginia, but the fact that we're going to like read color coded red actions for signs.

But like that's what we're reduced to we can't know facts, but we can know if it's a blue reduction. Yeah, that's just it feels like it's a metaphor for everything somehow.

And I wonder if there's going to be anything carried it in like he he did do it with a little carrot not do it. I mean, I really I've said this before, but it's like you know one of those I've written

down to books before and then seen a couple choice words taken out and made it made it look like a rave on the back of a book before, you know, the like this is amazingly bad and then someone says this is amazing.

And there are ways that it looks like his original bars original excerpting of the Mueller report in his letter to Congress. Those excerpts seem weird.

There are little examples of where they might have been done with intent to manipulate even to see if about what's in the report.

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