Shutdown Shoutdown: President Trump yesterday repeated his threat to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t give him tighter border security and pay for his promised wall.

“If we don’t get border security after many, many years of talk within the United States, I would have no problem doing a shutdown,” Trump said during a 40-minute news conference alongside visiting Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte. Trump said, “We’re the laughingstock of the world.”

Trump’s threats scare Republican members of Congress, but they don’t really do anything about it. “Obviously up here, we want to keep the government up and functioning,” Sen. John Thune of South Dakota told The NY Times. “I’m not sure where the president is coming from.”

Republican leaders say they thought Trump had agreed to delay immigration reform and border funding until later in the fall, and possibly after midterm elections if they survive.

Collusion Ain’t a Crime: President Trump’s legal apologist Rudy Giuliani said on CNN that he’s not sure it would have been a crime if President Trump had worked with the Russians to get himself elected. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor said. “You start analyzing the crime — the hacking is the crime. … The President didn’t hack.”

The Russians hacked — to help Trump.

Carrie Cordero, a CNN legal analyst said collusion isn’t a crime “in the literal sense” but that there could be related criminal violations such as receiving foreign money in a political campaign or assisting with or being an accessory to computer hacking.

Conspiracy to steal the election — that would be a crime.

What’s amazing about Giuliani’s claim is that he’s suggesting that so long  as colluding with the Russians to win an American election is not a crime, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Under Water: Relatives of two of the nine Indianapolis family members who drowned when a duck boat sank in a lake outside Branson. Mo. filed a federal lawsuit demanding $100 million in damages.

“Duck Boats are death traps for passengers and pose grave danger to the public on water and on land,” the lawsuit claims. Seventeen people were killed when the duck boat sank July 19th in violent weather.

The Justice Files: Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort heads to federal court in Alexandria, Va. to begin trial on a litany of financial crimes, including income tax evasion and bank fraud. Manafort seems pretty confident.

It’s the first trial to come out of the Robert Mueller Russia investigation, but it’s now really about that. Mueller stumbled across Manafort’s dealings while investigating the Russia connection. The heart of the  case involves nine years of Manafort’s consulting for Ukraine and its former leader Victor Yanukovych, work the US government said Manafort should have registered with the Justice Department.

The Obit Page: Nikolai Volkoff, a Croatian-born professional wrestler who sang the Soviet national anthem before matches and played a villainous communist on the mats against Hulk Hogan and other Cold War-era heroes of World Wrestling Entertainment, has died at age 70.

  WWE said Volkoff died the same day as two other former wrestling stars: Brickhouse Brown and Brian Christopher Lawler, who performed as Grand Master Sexay and was the son of wrestler Jerry Lawler.

  In the theatrical world of professional wrestling, Volkoff was what was known as a  “heel,” a cartoonish evil character. He was known for entering the ring with a fur ushanka hat and a red-and-gold turtleneck emblazoned with “USSR.”

  Volkoff’s character was a sendup to make fun of communism. He had actually fled Yugoslavia to get away from it.

Armchair Diagnosis: Donald Trump’s volatile and needy personality is the result of distant and uninvolved parenting argues an article published by Politico.

  Bandy Lee, a professor of law and psychology, and Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” say, “Most such men become almost completely dependent on others for their sense of self-worth. They become hypersensitive to slights. In the most extreme cases, their envy can prompt them to take sadistic pleasure in tormenting perceived enemies, and those they think are getting more respect than they are. In Trump’s case, his need to demonstrate over and over that he is worthy of admiration overwhelms his capacity to focus on nearly anything else.”

Lee and Schwartz write that, “Because he cannot tolerate even the mildest criticism, he is largely immune to learning and growth. Instead, unable to regulate his emotions, he reacts angrily, and often with threats of revenge, to any challenge to his authority. Even success provides him with only momentary satisfaction.”

They conclude that, “Trump’s grip on reality will likely continue to diminish as he faces increasing criticism, accusations, threats of impeachment and potential criminal indictments. We can expect him to become more desperate, more extreme in his comments, more violent in his threats, and more reckless and destructive in his actions.”

Well then, we have that to look forward to.