Last week, President Trump’s White House took a significant but little noticed action. “At meetings with top officials for various government departments this spring, Uttam Dhillon, a White House lawyer, told agencies not to cooperate with [any oversight] requests from Democrats,” reported Politico.

Of the many conflicts of interest created by President Trump’s family business, none is more glaring than his continued ownership of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The heavily panned faux-luxe establishment is the physical manifestation of Trump’s fledgling kleptocracy, a 263-room symbol of one man’s desire to squeeze every possible penny out of his presidency.

This essay has been adapted from a “Spiel” delivered by Leon Neyfakh on Slate’s daily podcast The Gist. An edited transcript of the audio recording is below, and you can listen to Neyfakh’s Spielby clicking on the player beneath this paragraph and fast-forwarding to the 14:05 mark.

Last week, in Portland, Oregon, a man with a history of white supremacist rhetoric allegedly killed two men and injured one other who had tried to stop his harassment of two young women—one black, the other wearing a hijab. A week earlier, in College Park, Maryland, another young man—active in white supremacist Facebook groups—killed a black college student after confronting him on the street, according to police.

On May 16, members of the Democratic Party elite gathered at a Four Seasons in Georgetown for the Center for American Progress’ Ideas Conference, which was widely seen as a cattle call for potential 2020 presidential candidates. If everyone hadn’t been so distracted by the unfolding Trump-Russia scandal, it might have felt more notable that among the speakers rumored to be 2020 prospects were four women: Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar.

The crowd gathered at Portland International Airport onJan. 29was loud and raucous. Protest signs were held aloft, and chants of “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here” filled the concourse. Among the throng were my 14-year-old son and me. For us, President Trump’s initial travel ban hit close to home.

Donald Trump’s pitch for his Trump University promised a world of possibility to potential students. “At Trump University, we teach success. That’s what it’s all about. Success,” he tells his audience. “It’s going to happen to you.” In one advertisement promoting free seminars for the school, Trump guaranteed results. “In just 90 minutes, my hand-picked instructors will share my techniques, which took my entire career to develop.

What should we make of President Trump’s latest budget proposal? Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, calls it a “taxpayer-first budget,” one that aims to balance the federal budget over the next decade by reducing future federal spending by $3.6 trillion.

May 9, 2017, was a momentous day in American politics—unless you were watching Fox News. Late that afternoon, President Trump stunned Washington by firing James Comey less than a week after the FBI director had testified to Congress about, among other things, the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia. On the heels of that news came a rapid-fire series of revelations that cast the dismissal in lights ranging from sinister to farcical.

You may have heard on the internet last week that, according to “multiple sources close to the intelligence, justice, and law enforcement communities,” the marshal of the Supreme Court had commenced the sacred impeachment-notification rite—you know, the one you learned about in civics class, in which the marshal marches to the White House in a cool costume and tells the president that proceedings for his removal have begun.