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Recently resigned Trump aide Michael Caputo, who publicly cheered the firing of Corey Lewandowski, dishes on the campaign.

The rare 'Opposite Trump' is out in force right now doing his get Hillary speech live - he's telepromptered up the wazoo, completely on-book and just using GOP boilerplate lines, not his own. It always sounds very fake and the antithesis of himself (and his appeal to his base), but I suspect it will reenergize the horse race narrative briefly and people will once again claim Trump has finally pivoted to the GE. That said, he's also still lying incessantly. I think the hope for 'New Trump' will last maybe 12 hours. He'll do something else insane by Friday at the latest, this is how he always works. One mediocre speech makes the media think he's finally changed, then he goes ape again. It happened most recently a week or two ago.

Art Parkinson (Rickon) talks to THR and IGN. Deadline claims Dinklage, Headey, Coster-Waldau, Harington and Clarke are the first round of cast who have been secured for Season 8.

While struggling to raise cash, Trump is being turned away by prospects for new staff, who fear career damage.

It Gets Better: The media is unraveling the mystery of Trump's paid advertisers, "Draper Sterling" (yes, from Mad Men).

That's enough.

A very rough translation from a French web retailer ad for The Secret History of Twin Peaks: The chronology is off, as TP took place in 1989 but the show aired in 1990-91. So either the retailer is off, which is very possible, or the show is retconning the timeframe. Meanwhile, this is happening in October, the same month as the book release: As the guest list includes Kyle, Laura Dern and Angelo Badalamenti (and several musicians also in the new cast list) and one of the sponsors is Showtime, I am willing to bet this will be some sort of preview event.

An in-depth piece on Reince Priebus and the RNC's ongoing struggles to domesticate Trump. This Rubio bit is hilarious:

#TrumpSoPoor

Broke as a joke. Trump's campaign made less money last month than Hamilton ticket sales and the Veronica Mars kickstarter.

I just don't think we can measure the Greyjoys of the Iron Islands against a modern, progressive scale of how to deal with people and trauma. This is a medieval world and theirs is an especially brutal, harsh culture in that fantasy world. Despite a few blunt remarks, Yara gave Theon the love and support she understood how to give him. That's her character, even when it's sometimes ugly, but a kind of tenderness was also shown between those two not just in that episode, but in others throughout this season. I don't believe any of the scenes suggest Theon has no identity beyond Yara, but I think the narrative is clear that he might prefer that. Those are two different things. He certainly does want to give himself over entirely to her effort to take back their home and lands. And that's his choice and I think it's a valid one as he struggles to rebuild his own sense of self-worth. The rest will have to come in time, if at all. Because really, what else could he do to feel like a positive contributing member of any society? Why not? She told him not to kill himself if he wanted to make a difference, and he does want to. So he's there. That's the most therapeutic treatment anyone from his culture and his world can hope for. It's more nurturing than he ever got from his family. Several of the Starks gave him love and acceptance but he could never fully accept it because he was always keeping one eye towards home, and he betrayed them because of that insecurity. Now he and Yara are doing all they can - the best they can with the emotional tools they have.

More on Trump's firing of Lewandowski - likely leaked from the campaign, but it's still a minute by minute.

That's... a new one on me.

I think you have a dramatically different perspective on the point of both Arya's and Theon's storylines this year versus what's actually been intended or IMO produced, but you're never going to see it my way so I'll try to leave it at that. I will say I don't think anything about either storyline is about nihilism, emptiness or jokes. Tyrion took a few shots at Theon because he remembered being mocked himself, that's about it. And I'm not sure he has any idea Theon was castrated, but as for Yara she's not exactly a soft touch either, coming from the Iron Islands. That being said, this is a medieval world and for all her rough edges she loves her brother. That's been proven for her whole run but especially this season. And Theon is the one reminding everyone of what he's done - he did it again last night.

Trumptastrophe!

Oh, for sure. He's lucky to be alive. But I don't think most heroic leaders - especially relatively young ones like Jon - would necessarily have known how to handle that situation differently. The show has portrayed him as a born leader on a hero's journey (they don't have to be mutually exclusive) triumphing while also making mistakes, and here he did both. Whether he will live to be a leader vs. a hero long-term is, as you say, an open question.

Jon has never been infallible, but then again no one on the show is anymore. Ramsay was already beginning to lose his grip on the North before he lost at Winterfell. Sansa did the right thing but it forces her to parlay with Littlefinger, which is unavoidable. Tyrion had a good idea negotiating with the slavers, but they came back and sacked the city, forcing him and Daenerys to forge a third way involving dragons, incineration and leaving only one representative alive. At best the more heroic characters do the best they can. Jon is no diplomat or schemer, but he is a good warrior. He just needs to learn some of his sister's (cousin's?) cunning or leave that end of things to her.

Yeah, they gave Littlefinger multiple(?) scenes this season talking about going to the North to aid the victor in the battle for Winterfell. He literally rode off for the North a few weeks ago. He told Cersei his exact plan last season. He offered his services to Sansa a couple weeks ago, then she wrote him. So yeah, it was very explicitly set up. Sansa and Jon hugged and had their time together to relax when they reunited. The end of that battle wasn't really about anything other than exhaustion and some measure of resolution, which they got given what they'd lost. I thought the quiet moment with the unfurling of the Stark banner again (while the Flayed Man falls into the mud) was really understated and beautiful. They could've made even more music swell over that like they'd had all episode, but instead they played it down because the image was enough. Well, I already talked about why Sansa didn't tell Jon. But what they've outlined all season, since their reunion and their first night back together, is that Jon and Sansa do have a loving relationship but that they're also very different people. They've both seen different things as they've come into adulthood and they react to them differently, and Sansa plays things her way while Jon plays them his, and that leads to friction. That's earned character conflict and inherent drama - we see it on soap operas all the time. They're not at each other's throats but they're not in total unison. That's the way a lot of people are, it just so happens that their circumstances could be life and death. I don't know how much you've been watching or when, but I think this season in particular is the polar opposite of nihilism. I don't watch nihilism TV and I never have. This is the most hopeful season GOT's ever had. When you talk about an anti-reunion and no emotion, I have to feel like you're either not watching it or just seeing what you want to. Which is your prerogative, but I don't think it's entirely fair to what the show is putting out onscreen. I could understand a great amount of the heavy criticisms online of the flawed Season 5 (Dorne!!!) even when I didn't agree with all of them, or even parts of Season 4 which had issues here and there, but the show has changed dramatically after it came off the leash of the existing books.

But wait! There's more! Also: Rolling Stone has a remarkably candid piece opining why the media has, as I discussed above, finally started unloading on Trump.

I thought it was an incredibly emotional episode, and it's followed a strong narrative for Sansa and Jon all season since she was rescued by Brienne, said goodbye to Theon (who IIRC embraced as friends), then reunited with Jon. I don't think there was anything cold or bloodless about it. I think Sansa's dressing-down of Baelish a few episodes back also drives that home. This whole season has been about emotional climaxes and catharses for the heroic characters, starting with the premiere. That's another reason they've taken so many character beats with Jon and Sansa just talking together in episode after episode. Sansa kept the secret from Jon because she knew she couldn't trust Littlefinger, didn't know if he'd come and because, first and foremost (even if she had known for sure) if they'd waited for the Vale, Ramsay would've sensed trouble and holed up in Winterfell for an endless siege like Riverrun. The only way to get him was to get him out on the battlefield and overconfident. Jon is a strong and noble commander but he didn't know how to deal with Ramsay's madness, and he would've died there if she hadn't called in the Vale, but at the same time they would've never stopped the Boltons if Jon and their force hadn't been out there almost dying in the field. It was a sacrifice and not a pretty one, but it was necessary to get Ramsay out of Winterfell and take him down. That's war.

I think most of the outlets are turning on Trump, actually, now that we're facing the general. The attention has gotten much more focused and critical, as the Beltway has begun to realize this is really dangerous and they have to cut the [!@#$%^&*]. That's what got us the various pieces from NBC and the print journalists in the last few weeks that have just torn Trump up about his business dealings. Last week MSNBC cut away from Trump's rambling pressers to go to Hillary. I've never seen that happen before, and it is a sea change that means something. They still want a horse race narrative, of course; they always do. But it's most embodied by disgusting entrenched hack Mark Halperin, who wrote a great dishy book (Game Change) with his buddy John Heilemann but is still the conservative sympathizer who called Obama "kind of a dick" on live TV. Halperin and Heilemann have a docuseries, The Circus, premiering on Showtime shortly following all the candidates around this year, but that's not the story here. The story is how closely Halperin seems to have become personally attached to Donald Trump after following him on the trail over the last year, a la the rest of the press' long love affair with John McCain - there's a ton of cozy photos of them together, and he has a long track record of defending Trump's many foibles in the face of incredulity from even the Morning Joe crew, like the time a while back when he insisted Trump could take California and then when he claimed Trump's comments about Mexicans weren't racist. Or the time he all but did a direct address to the camera begging Trump to tone it down, promising the media could side with him against Clinton if only he weren't so mean to them. Anyway: Halperin got roasted the other day for his latest in a series of 'what if?' tweets trying to create a narrative for Trump to become the nation's hero. Here's the glorious deets. Enjoy. The good news is, Halperin's the only one out there stumping in the mainstream. The rest of the media doesn't seem to be trying too hard for the horse race here, possibly because they (like me) suspect Trump will not be the candidate after all. Unrelated: Mediaite noticed this, which I didn't - buried in a piece comparing Trump to Romney's troubles, the NYT again hints Trump is too broke to campaign.

That's what he's always done, though. This was a coup by Paul Manafort, who is considered the saner and more savvy party who is trying to get Trump in line with the GOP and the convention. Supposedly Trump's kids forced it.

RIP in peace, Corey Lewandowski.

Emilia Clarke and Gemma Whelan on the latest GOT supercouple: And other BTS stuff: