Donald Trump and maga Republicans are controlling main stream media following the tyrants evil instruction manual

Dear  Friends,  Once you begin surrendering to Trump, he always wants more. You can’t appease a tyrant.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they depress.

Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the kind of work she came to do was “increasingly becoming impossible,” as stories were now evaluated “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

Echo essay published by Robert Reich in Substack.

Whose ideological expectations was Hastey referring to❓ Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it’s the sociopath in the Oval Office❓

Hastey’s criticism came a little over two weeks after Bari Weiss, the anti-“woke” opinion journalist who became editor-in-chief CBS’s News, unveiled her “21st century” vision at a town hall meeting. Weiss told producers and staff they were free to leave if they didn’t like it.

Since then, at least six out of CBS Evening News’s twenty producers have accepted buyouts.

At that town hall meeting Weiss also named a bunch of new contributors — including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia. 

In the latest tranche of Epstein Files, Attia appears over 1,700 times, including an email in which he tells Epstein that “p—y is, indeed, low carb.”

In a missive to the newsroom, Weiss declared that “We love America” should be a guiding principle for the relaunch of the CBS Evening News.

Meanwhile, Weiss has replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — who was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.

In one of his first broadcasts, Dokoupil accepted without question Israel’s justification for violating the terms of the ceasefire when it killed three journalists in Gaza, reporting only that “Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas.”

Weiss faced blowback in December when she shelved a “60 Minutes” report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, hours before it was set to air.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, had accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

The segment later aired on January 8, drawing in over 5 million viewers.

The story CBS posted about Ms. Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis reported that “The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Ms. Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”

No identifiable source was given for CBS’s assertion of “internal bleeding.” A CBS News staffer reported “huge internal concern” that the source was an anonymous leak by the Trump administration meant for an outlet they could trust to run it, no questions asked.

Weiss doesn’t exactly report to Donald Trump, of course. Trump runs CBS News the way he runs Venezuela — with a widely-understood threat that he’ll wreak havoc if it doesn’t do what he wants.

As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.”

Perhaps CBS News didn’t edit Dokoupil’s rambling interview with Trump because, moments after it ended, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “‘if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”

You see the way Trump now controls CBS News? Dokoupil is Bari Weiss’s newly-minted anchor. Bari Weiss is David Ellison’s newly-minted head of CBS News. David Ellison is his father’s (Larry Ellison) newly-minted head of Paramount, which is the new owner of CBS. Larry Ellison is a pal of Trump’s, who contributes to Trump’s super PAC. And Trump? He has the power to take the prized Warner Bros Discovery out of the clutches of Netflix and deliver it to Ellison.

Among David Ellison’s first moves at CBS was to gut DEI policies, appoint right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and appoint Weiss.

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But, that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had responsibilities to the American public that transcended making money for CBS’s investors.


America can survive without a “60 Minutes” it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post, that Jeff Bezos censored and whose newsroom he just gutted.

But, at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.

In contrast to Trump's suck-up of CBS News, the courageous CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow, from April 13, 1954  HERE.  https://youtu.be/z6j6iTN7Tkw

Measles is a highly contagious preventable virus but unvaccinated Texas children are spreading the illness

Texas measles outbreak nears 100 cases, raising concerns about undetected spread. Echo report published in CBSNews Healthwatch by Amy Maxmen:

Texas measles hasn't lightened up since its onset in late January, and some schools in West Texas

Some private schools shut down because of a rapidly escalating measles outbreak in West Texas. 

Local health departments are overstretched, pausing other important work as they race to limit the spread of this highly contagious virus.

Since the outbreak emerged three weeks ago, the Texas health department has confirmed 90 cases with at least 16 hospitalizations, as of Feb. 21. Most of those infected are under age 18. 

Officials suspect that nine additional measles cases reported in New Mexico, across the border from the epicenter of the Texas outbreak in Gaines, are linked to the Texas outbreak. Ongoing investigations seek to confirm that connection.

Health officials worry they're missing cases. Undetected infections bode poorly for communities because doctors and health officials can't contain transmission if they can't identify who is infected.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer for The Immunization Partnership in Houston, a nonprofit that advocates for vaccine access. "I think this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better."*

An unknown number of parents may not be taking sick children to clinics where they could be tested, said Katherine Wells, the public health director in Lubbock, Texas. "If your kids are responding to fever reducers and you're keeping hydrated, some people may keep them at home," she said.

Most unvaccinated people will contract measles if they're exposed to the airborne virus, which can linger for up to two hours indoors. Those infected can spread the disease before they have symptoms. Around 1 in 5 people with measles end up hospitalized, 1 in 10 children develop ear infections that can lead to permanent hearing loss, and about 1 in 1,000 children die from respiratory and neurological conditions.

Gaines has a large Mennonite population, which often shuns vaccinations. "We respect everyone's right to vaccinate or not get vaccinated," said Albert Pilkington, CEO of the Seminole Hospital District, in the heart of the county, in an interview with Texas Standard. "That's just what it means to be an American, right?"

Local health officials have been trying to persuade the parents of unvaccinated children to protect their kids by bringing them to pop-up clinics offering measles vaccines.

"Some people who were on the fence, who thought measles wasn't something their kids would see, are recalculating and coming forward for vaccination," Wells said.

Local health departments are also operating mobile testing units outside schools in an attempt to detect infections before they spread. They're staffing clinics that can provide treatment prophylactically for infants exposed to the virus, who are too young for vaccination. Local health officials are advising day care centers on how to protect young children and babies, and educating school nurses on how to spot signs of the disease.

"I am putting 75% of my staff on this outbreak," Wells said. Although Lubbock isn't at the center of the outbreak, people infected have sought treatment there. "If someone infected was in the [emergency room], we need to identify everyone who was in that ER within two hours of that visit, notify them, and find out if they were vaccinated."

Local health departments in rural areas are notoriously underfunded. Wells said the workload has meant pressing pause on other programs, such as one providing substance abuse education.

Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, which includes Gaines, said health officials were following CDC guidelines, as of last year, by advising schools to keep unvaccinated children home for 21 days if they shared a classroom or the cafeteria with someone infected. This means that many parents may need to stay home from work to care for their kids.

"A lot of private schools have closed down because of a high number of sick children," Holbrooks said.

The burden of measles outbreaks multiplies as the disease spreads. Curbing a 2018 outbreak in Washington state with 72 cases cost about $2.3 million, in addition to $76,000 in medical costs, and an estimated $1 million in economic losses due to illness, quarantines, and caregiving.

Public health researchers expect such outbreaks to become larger and more common because of scores of laws around the U.S. — pending and recently passed — that ultimately lower vaccine rates by allowing parents to exempt their children from vaccine requirements at public schools and some private schools.

Such policies are coupled with misinformation about childhood vaccination now platformed at the highest levels of government. The new director of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has erroneously blamed vaccines for autism, pointing to discredited theories shown to be untrue by more than a dozen scientific studies.

In Kennedy's first week on the job, HHS postponed an important meeting of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, without saying when it would resume. In addition, the CDC's letter template to school principals, advising unvaccinated children to remain home from school for 21 days if they've been exposed to the measles virus, is no longer on the agency's website. An old version remains posted on its archive.

As a rule, at least 95% of people need to be vaccinated against measles for a community to be well protected. That threshold is high enough to protect infants too young for the vaccine, people who can't take the vaccine for medical reasons, and anyone who doesn't mount a strong, lasting immune response to it. Last school year, the number of kindergartners exempted from a vaccine requirement was higher than ever reported before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Gaines, Texas, exemptions were far higher than the national average, approaching 20% in 2023-24. 

In fact, Gaines has one of the lowest rates of childhood vaccination in Texas. At a local public school district in the community of Loop, only 46% of kindergarten students have gotten vaccines that protect against measles.

Amid an outbreak that displays the toll of measles in under-vaccinated pockets of America, Texas lawmakers have filed about 25 bills in this year's legislative session that could limit vaccination further. Lakshaman said the public — the majority of whom believe in the benefits of measles vaccination — should contact their representatives about the danger of such decisions. Her group and others offer resources to get involved.

"We've got children winding up in the hospital, and yet lawmakers who've got their blinders on," she said, referring to pending policies that will erode vaccination rates. "It's just mind-blowing."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

In the file "I told you so" with tragic consequences

Echo published in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin

Donald Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Has Its Roots in RussiaBoth situations stem from the President’s apparent willingness to accept political favors from foreign leaders, and his eagerness to do Putin’s bidding.

(Maine Writer- In the file of "I told you so!) 

Donald Trump and his allies nearly succeeded in consigning the Mueller report to oblivion. William Barr, Trump’s compliant Attorney General, got a jump on the process when he preëmpted the public release of the report by providing a misleading summary, which minimized the special counsel’s findings on Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. 

Trump compounded Barr’s distortions by falsely and endlessly repeating that the report found “no collusion, no obstruction.” Congressional Democrats did little for the cause of clarity by using the report as an occasion to debate the semantics of what constitutes an impeachment investigation. And Robert Mueller himself invited a certain measure of confusion by telling his story in dense, legalistic prose. Barely six months after he delivered the report, it had already faded into the mists of Trumpiana: post-Sean Spicer, pre-whistle-blower.

The whistle-blower revealed Trump’s July 25th phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, in which, according to the official memorandum, Trump said that he wanted a “favor,” then asked Zelensky to look into negative information concerning Joe Biden, at the time the Democratic front-runner for 2020. The request was so plainly an abuse of Presidential power—Zelensky was awaiting delivery of military aid already approved by Congress—that Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, launched an investigation focused on impeachment, to be led by Adam Schiff, the chair of the Intelligence Committee. Mueller and Russia are out; Schiff and Ukraine are in.

But the Russia and Ukraine scandals are, in fact, one story. 

Indeed, the Trump's false denials in both of them capture the common themes: soliciting help from foreign interests for partisan gain, followed by obstruction of efforts to uncover what happened. Both, too, share roots in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mueller’s two indictments of Russian interests—the first involving the use of social media and the second the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails—are perhaps the most detailed chronicle ever published of foreign interference in a U.S. political campaign. Trump’s team was appreciative. When a public-relations adviser to a Russian oligarch’s family e-mailed Donald Trump, Jr., offering dirt on Hillary Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” the candidate’s son gave a straightforward reply: “If it’s what you say I love it.”

Just two years earlier, Putin had invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The government in Kiev went back and forth between leaders who wanted to accommodate Putin’s regime and others who wanted to enlist the help of the West to push back against it. 

Moreover, the political consultant of choice for the pro-Russian faction was Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chair in the summer of 2016. As Mueller documented, Manafort passed proprietary campaign polling data to pro-Russian Ukrainians. The campaign-era Trump portrayed in the report suffered from one major limitation: he wasn’t President. He clearly welcomed Putin’s assistance, and promised a better relationship with Russia; but he was still just a businessman from New York.

The whistle-blower’s complaint is the epilogue to Mueller’s report: the coming of age of an illegal aspiring colluder.

(In the file of "I told you so") It’s important to note, as well, that, in the Ukrainian chapter, Trump has done Putin’s bidding, to the extent that he can, going so far as to embrace a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 campaign. The rest of the U.S. government has never been as enamored of Putin as Trump is. That includes Republicans in Congress, who joined the Democrats in voting for military aid to Ukraine. Trump wants no part of conflict with Putin, but the aid package tied his hands. There was a revealing moment in his joint news conference with Zelensky at the United Nations last month. Almost as an aside, Trump said, “I really believe that President Putin would like to do something. I really hope that you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.” Ukraine doesn’t have a “problem” with Putin—it has an invasion by Putin.

In the July 25th phone call, Trump did what he couldn’t do as a candidate: he tried to leverage the power of the Presidency to extract partisan political advantage. Texts of U.S. officials, released last week, further suggest an attempted quid pro quo. On September 1st, William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Kiev, asked, “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” Gordon Sondland, a former Republican fund-raiser who is Trump’s Ambassador to the European Union, replied, “Call me.”
Ten times Donald Trump obstructed justice documented in the Mueller Report.- CBS News reports.

Mueller did chronicle Trump’s efforts, as President, to interfere with his investigation. Trump made repeated attempts to rein in or fire Mueller, and was saved from that misconduct only by the refusal of people around him (including Don McGahn, his White House counsel; Rob Porter, his staff secretary; and even Corey Lewandowski, his otherwise zealous onetime campaign manager) to carry out his directives. The lesson of the past few weeks is that those restraining figures have left the building, literally and figuratively. Trump is currently surrounded by people like Barr and Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, who are willing to debase their offices to indulge Trump’s abuse of power. The unhinged arias of Rudolph Giuliani, his personal lawyer, are a constant from the Russian chapter to the Ukrainian. In customary fashion, Trump has sought to normalize his corruption, by bragging that he could recruit even more countries, including China, to conduct political investigations for him. That’s still an abuse of power, even though he’s now doing it in public, rather than bothering to try to hide it.

Mueller famously closed his investigation without rendering a judgment on whether the President committed crimes. “We did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct,” he wrote. The time, though, for ultimate conclusions is approaching. 

One way of looking at Trump’s evolution from candidate to President, from Mueller’s time to Schiff’s, is that his abuses are accelerating, with each unpunished act serving as a license for more. The Constitution gives Congress the tools to halt this cycle in Trump’s out-of-control Presidency. The question now is whether the people’s representatives will use them. This article appears in the print edition of the October 14, 2019, issue, with the headline “From Russia to Ukraine.”

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The NewYorker since 1993, and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.

All the evidence the Republicans need is written in the reconstructed White House transcript

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-transcript-read-ukraine-president-phone-call-transcript-pdf-released-today-joe-biden-crowdstrike-2019-09-25/

"...the Trump call with Zelensky took place a day after Robert Mueller testified before Congress about the Russia investigation and about whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice..."

Speaker of the House Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi

Read the White House transcript:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-transcript-read-ukraine-president-phone-call-transcript-pdf-released-today-joe-biden-crowdstrike-2019-09-25/

Trump left Speaker Pelosi no option but impeachment inquiry
Revelations about the president pressuring a foreign government to investigate a political rival crossed a line.

An editorial echo published in The Mercury News, a California newspaper:

Donald Trump’s behavior left House Speaker Nancy Pelosi no choice but to open the fourth impeachment inquiry in the nation’s history.

Congress and the country cannot ignore actions by Trump that have come to light in the past two weeks. They cannot ignore White House stonewalling that eased only after Pelosi on Tuesday announced the formal investigation.

Pelosi had for months resisted calls for an impeachment inquiry. But for Pelosi, and for us, the latest revelations about Trump’s pressuring of a foreign government to investigate his political rival crossed a line, making it essential that the House launch a formal impeachment inquiry.

As Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky requested U.S. assistance to help fend off Russian aggression, Trump replied by pressing for a foreign investigation of unsubstantiated allegations about former Vice President Joe Biden. It’s all there in the reconstructed transcript, released Wednesday, of the July 25 conversation between the two men.

Trump and his allies claim that the president never expressed a clear quid pro quo in his conversation with Zelensky. But Trump didn’t need to explicitly say what was obvious — that Ukraine needs our nation’s support and protection if it has any hope of survival.

What Trump didn’t tell Zelensky was that he was blocking $391 million of security assistance for the country. But, according to the intelligence officer who blew the whistle on Trump’s action, Ukrainian leaders understood that they needed to show willingness to “play ball” before Trump would even talk to Zelensky.

Has Trump gone too far? Has he committed an impeachable offense? Do his actions constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Ultimately that’s a question the House of Representatives must decide as it determines whether to impeach him – and for the Senate to determine if it tries him.

Before they and the nation try to answer that question, the president’s actions must be thoroughly investigated.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has repeatedly resisted attempts by members of Congress to carry out their oversight responsibilities. In this case, until the impeachment inquiry was formally launched, the White House had balked at releasing the reconstructed transcript and the whistle-blower letter.

The president’s behavior is, as U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, put it, “deeply troubling.” It must be investigated.

After more than two years of national discussion about protecting our elections from foreign influence, the president – personally – solicited outside interference.

Pelosi and Schumer: futility of expensive Trump border wall

Video shows the confrontational White House meeting

Essay echo published in the History News Network by Juan Cole*

(MaineWriter- Yet again, we need a reminder that Donald Trump said Mexico will pay for the wall.)

Ann Arbor, MI (Informed Comment) – Trump’s televised badgering of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi was made for cable television, which predictably looped it over and over again. 

Cable stations assembled “panels” of “experts” who solemnly parsed Trump’s insane meanderings, Schumer’s hamming it up for the cameras, and Pelosi’s call for a “fact-based” discussion.

Less was said by cable news about the substance of the main point of debate, which is that Trump, having bankrupted the government with massive tax cuts for his billionaire cronies last February, now wants to increase government spending by spending $5 bn for a border wall. Although they initially thought they might throw Trump a bone (a mere $1.6 bn?), the wave of anger and indignation this mealy-mouthed approach provoked among the Democratic faithful appears to have put some iron in their spines. Pelosi told Trump to his face that he wouldn’t be able to find a majority in the House for such spending.

Here are the top 6 reasons the Democrats shouldn’t spend a cent on Trump’s vanity project of a border wall:

1. Trump’s conviction that there is a crisis of illegal border crossings in the Southwest shows that he is stuck in the 1980s and 1990s. The problem has plummeted in significance in the past decade and a half, according to The Center for Migration Studies. The Border Patrol is only arresting about 1/4 the number of those attempting to come in without paperwork as was true in the 1990s. And, in 2014 only one tenth as many people even tried to come in illegally as in 2005. (Taken together, these two statistics show that Border Patrol’s efficiency in apprehending undocumented entrants has increased substantially).

2. Politifact certified former California governor Jerry Brown’s argument that southwest border arrests of undocumented entrants are as low as they have been in 50 years. The trend lines all show a sharp drop-off in this problem, so why enact heroic measures now?

3. Even if you were worried about undocumented immigrants, which most Americans are not, putting billions into wall-building is useless. In 2014, DHS figures show that two-thirds of undocumented immigrants into the US that year came in through airports and simply overstayed their visas. In general, it estimated that among the some 11 million undocumented residents in the US, 42% were visa overstays who came in legally by air or sea, and that proportion is certainly much higher today.

4. The number of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the US has fallen from 6.9 million in 2007 to only 5.4 million today, declining by 1 million persons. The problem is going away, since more are leaving than coming in. . Politifact notes that U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, (D-La Crosse) said, “We’re experiencing a net outflow of illegal, undocumented workers from America back to Mexico. To build a wall now would be locking them in this country.”

5. There is no reason to think that a wall, which would harm the environment and migrating animals, would even be effective. In 2010-2015, nearly 10,000 people came in through areas where there is already a border fence (about 654 miles). People dig tunnels, e.g.

6. A scientific study of 200 urban areas over the past several decades shows that those with high numbers of immigrants for the most part actually saw falling or stable levels of crime. Trump’s conviction that immigrants = crime is empirically untrue. Undocumented immigrants for the most part are especially law-abiding, since they don’t want to be apprehended and deported. Obviously, there are immigrant criminals, but they are a tiny percentage of the whole, and there is substantial evidence that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

Beyond the problem that Trump repeatedly asserts things that are patently untrue on the immigration issue, the fact of the matter is that Democrats need to stand up to him if they are to vindicate themselves. They ran on a more progressive America, not on an America that is a giant prison surrounded by walls.

*Juan Cole is Director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan. He maintains a blog on US foreign policy and progressive politics, Informed Comment.

Donald Trump must be removed as a candidate

Trump campaign management is chaotic.....

Scott Pelley interview on CBS News

CBS' Evening News Highlights GOP Civil War Breaking Out Over Trump’s Racist Attacks

Scott Pelley: "The Man Who Will Soon Be The Head Of The Republican Party Appears To Be Threatening Its Chances For The White House, The House, And The Senate"

SCOTT PELLEY (HOST): 

Tonight Donald Trump is standing by his attack on the Mexican-American federal judge who is presiding over the Trump University fraud cases. In insisting that a Latino judge cannot be fair, Trump is picking a fight with exactly the voters he needs in November, Latinos. Major Garrett reports the man who will soon be the head of the Republican Party appears to be threatening its chances for the White House, the House, and the Senate.

[...]
MAJOR GARRETT: Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican parents who became American citizens.

(TRUMP: We're going to have great borders. We're going to have the wall.)

GARRETT: Donald Trump, who wants to build a wall on the US-Mexican border, argues Curiel's heritage compromises his independence in the lawsuits.

GARRETT: This made Republican leaders who had begun to rally around the presumptive nominee recoil.

JASON CHAFFETZ: People are disturbed that you would want to try and dismiss a judge based on his ethnicity.

MARCO RUBIO: He needs to stop staying it. That man is an American.

SEN. BOB CORKER: I don't condone the comments.

PAUL RYAN: I completely disagree with the thinking behind that.  (Shame on Speaker Ryan for endorsing Trump, in the first place....)

MITCH MCCONNELL: I couldn't disagree more with what he had to say.

GARRETT: Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins has yet to endorse Trump.

SUSAN COLLINS: It was an appalling statement for Donald Trump to have made, completely unacceptable, and he owes the judge an apology, and he owes the American people an apology.

Scott Pelley CBS News comment and report

GARRETT: Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse tweeted Trump's attacks are quote, "The literal definition of racism." Even for former speaker, Newt Gingrich, long a Trump ally, it was too much.

NEWT GINGRICH: This is one of the worst mistakes Trump has made, and I think it's inexcusable.

GARRETT: Trump appeared most unnerved by Gingrich's criticism.

GARRETT: This afternoon, in a call with close supporters, Trump doubled down and encouraged them to robustly defend his view of the case. Even Trump loyalists admit the campaign staff is too small and management chaotic. Today's conference is a classic example. Trump told supporters to discuss the pending lawsuit freely. The exact opposite of what his own campaign staff had been telling them to do.

(Listen up Reince Priebus....Republicans must remove Donald Trump as the party's presumptive nominee and nominate a qualified candidate.)