Trump to a Group of Hurricane Victims: 'What a Crowd! What a Turnout!' 

Here’s all the shit we couldn’t cover today:

• The president is busy being well, himself, in Texas, waving a flag around and finding, against the odds, some way to name himself the winner of this hurricane. It could, unfortunately, be worse. “It’s a real team, and we want to do it better than ever before,” Trump said of the emergency response effort. “We want to be looked at in five years, in 10 years from now as, this is the way to do it.” Later, spotting a crowd of people, he said “What a crowd!” and “What a turnout!” [New York Times]
• A new Indiana law is allowing voters to get kicked off the rolls without even being informed that they’re being kicked off the rolls. [The Daily Beast]
• Tillerson is still hard at work dismantling his department, getting rid of most special envoys and, even more curiously, the State cyber office. Now, why on earth might we need that? [ABC News, The Hill]
• The EPA has put a climate change denier in charge of its Midwest office. Which I guess shouldn’t be surprising, considering the climate change denier in charge of its D.C. office. [The Hill]
• Freaking Laura Ingraham has apparently figured out that actually, maybe government jobs probably should be filled, because what about dealing with crises like Harvey and North Korea? To which the president replied on Twitter that nah, they should not. [Politico]
• This is really, really good. [Los Angeles Times]
• Spicey meets Popey. How nicey for Spicey. [Politico]

Here are some tweets the president was allowed to publish:

This has been Barf Bag.