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• A Florida Gen Xer made over $300,000 secretly working three jobs in the tech industry.
• The extra income allowed his partner to quit their job and helped pay for a $20,000 cruise.   
• He shared four pieces of advice for current and future overemployed workers. 

After being laid off from his tech job in 2019, Robert wanted two things: job stability and multiple sources of income.

Over the course of his career, the Florida Gen Xer had lost eight jobs due to a combination of layoffs, business closures, acquisitions, and contracts not being renewed, he told Business Insider via email.

By 2021, he'd found a remote job that he said paid $180,000 a year and had a part-time gig that was bringing in an additional $2,000 a month. But when his workflow at his main job slowed, he began to fear that a layoff could be coming.

He went looking for other remote jobs and landed one that paid $190,000 a year. But before he resigned from his current role, he remembered hearing about a former coworker who was making nearly $400,000 secretly working two jobs.

So he decided to try to juggle both roles at the same time.

For six weeks, Robert said he was getting two semimonthly paychecks on the same day that he said totaled over $10,000 after taxes and deductions.

When the anticipated layoff from his first job came, his income was cut in half, but he said he'd learned a valuable lesson.

"Having another income still there only reinforced the idea that having a backup job was the best way to keep from being jobless in tech," said Robert, whose identity is known to BI but has been withheld due to his fear of professional repercussions.

In 2023, Robert earned roughly $335,000 across four remote jobs, according to documents viewed by BI, and he said working three jobs at once — which he did for about half the year — only required about 50 hours of total work a week.

Robert said the extra income from job juggling allowed his partner to quit their job, helped him pay down his car loan and credit card debt, and made it possible for him to take several expensive vacations — including a roughly $20,000 cruise that he said had more crew than passengers.

Overemployment has also provided Robert with the improved job security he was looking for. The tech industry layoffs of the past year have made him value having a backup plan as much as ever.

Robert is among a niche group of overemployed workers — many in the tech and IT industries — secretly holding multiple remote jobs and earning well over six figures a year. While some bosses may be OK with employees taking on extra work, being caught doing so without approval could be a fireable offense.

How to make overemployment a reality

After Robert's first six weeks of overemployment came to an end, he said he sent out "hundreds" of resumes in the hopes of finding a second job. A month or two later, he was deciding between two offers when he had an idea.

"Three jobs never really crossed my mind, but I thought I would try both and select the best one," he said. "When I realized I could do all three, I decided to keep them."

For nearly five months in 2022, he said he was working three jobs that he said paid him over $30,000 a month after taxes and deductions. Eventually one of the jobs, a contract role, came to an end. He then worked two jobs for a while until he found a third job again in 2023.

Over the past year, Robert has worked between two and three jobs — he currently has two roles but is interviewing for a third. If all goes well, he said he'll land the third job, juggle three roles for the first half of this year, and then drop his least favorite role. His goal is to earn $420,000 this year across his jobs.

Robert said his tentative plan is to continue being overemployed until he has $1 million in savings and retirement accounts and no debt. He hopes to accomplish this in the next few years and then focus on just one job for 10 to 15 years before retiring.

"I am far from rich but in decent shape financially," he said.

4 pieces of advice for current and future overemployed workers

Robert has several pieces of advice for current and aspiring overemployed workers.

First, he said it's good to have a primary job that one enjoys and has opportunities for career growth. But the priorities should change for any additional role.

"Your second and third jobs should be a combination of something that you can do easily, something that is not overbearing with the workload, and something that is fun," he said. "If you have two or more jobs with a high workload or are very boring, then you will get burned out."

Second, Robert said overemployed workers need to be prepared to juggle multiple meetings at once. He said this has been the most difficult part of job juggling, and that blocking off time on his calendars hasn't been a full-proof solution.

"You have to be real good at muting and lowering volumes so you stay engaged and not embarrass yourself," he said.

Robert's third piece of advice was to be smart about handling LinkedIn and résumés. He said LinkedIn profiles should list "Company" or "Company Confidential" as one's current position — and that listing all previous jobs on a résumé could raise suspicion.

Lastly, Robert said the overemployed should never stop interviewing so they have options if one job doesn't work out.

Robert said his overemployment journey likely wouldn't have happened if the pandemic hadn't led more companies to adopt remote working arrangements.

When he worked remotely for the first time in March 2020, Robert found himself with a lot of time on his hands and started thinking about ways he could grow his income.

"When COVID made working remotely more common, new possibilities opened up," he said.

Are you working multiple remote jobs at the same time and willing to discuss details about your pay and schedule? If so, reach out to this reporter at jzinkula@insider.com.

Sometimes it is possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the world of law and politics. Friday’s Colorado court decision refusing to apply the 14th Amendment to disqualify former President Donald Trump from appearing on the Republican presidential primary ballot in Colorado is just such a moment. 

For people who believe that Trump should be disqualified, the judge’s holding is a disappointing defeat. But there is a powerful silver lining in this cloud for those who understand that facts and truth are essential to the survival of democracy, freedom and the rule of law. 

For the first time, a judge, having heard evidence and conducted a hearing under section 3 of the 14^th Amendment, has stated unequivocally that Donald Trump committed an “insurrection against the Constitution.” Section 3 provides:  

"No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office . . . under the United States . . .who, having previously taken an oath, . . . as an officer of the United States . . . to support the Constitution . . .  shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same . . . ."

As Judge Sarah Wallace puts it in her 102-page decision: "The court finds that . . .Trump engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 through incitement, and that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s speech."

Thus, the Colorado court has both affirmed the commitment to truth that animates the justice system under the rule of law and set another marker of Trump's deviation from constitutional governance. The court’s decision makes a record for history. 

The plaintiffs in the case built on the work of scholars and commentators who concluded that Trump was a federal “officer” during his term as president and that his involvement in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021, and the events of that day were acts of insurrection. 

Unfortunately, after determining the correctness of the last premise, Judge Wallace veered off the course of sensible constitutional interpretation. She held that a president is not a federal “officer” and that the framers of Section 3 intended to allow an insurrectionist president to hold future office.  

She also held that because the presidential oath is to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, Trump never vowed to “support” it, as Section 3 requires. 

As Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed in 1819 in the seminal case of McCulloch v. Maryland, courts “must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding.” Judges, he thought, should avoid belittling our foundational document by parsing language in ways that defy its overriding purpose of preserving our constitutional republic. That is precisely what Judge Wallace’s legal conclusions seem to have done. 

But, by giving Trump a win on the disqualification question, Wallace has made it hard for the 2024 hopeful and his cronies to dismiss her decision as partisan, or animated by hatred of the former president, as they have done when other judges ruled against Trump. In fact, on Saturday he called the Colorado ruling “a gigantic court victory.” Perhaps he had not read or digested what it said about his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

Wallace’s conclusion about disqualification comes on the heels of decisions by other state courts that, on other grounds, have also rejected the application of Section 3 to Trump. On Nov. 8, the Minnesota Supreme Court  decided that the secretary of State lacked authority to bar Trump from the primary ballot. But it did not reach the questions of whether Trump had engaged in insurrection or whether he was ineligible to hold office under the 14^th Amendment if he were elected president.  

On Nov. 14, a Michigan trial court reached a similar conclusion about Trump’s eligibility to appear on that state’s Republican primary ballot. Again, however, the court did not reach the question of Trump’s responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection or whether he could be disqualified from holding office under the 14^th Amendment.  

The judge in that case decided that it “should be up to Congress to decide whether Trump is disqualified under the section of the U.S. Constitution that bars from office a person who ‘engaged in insurrection’… and whether or not someone participated in it rather than ‘one single judicial officer.’”  

Judge Wallace felt no such need to defer to the Congress on the question of whether Trump had engaged in insurrection. She proceeded to hear testimony from academic experts who discussed the meaning of insurrection and Trump’s responsibility for the Capitol attack. Judge Wallace also heard from people who were there on Jan. 6, including Capitol Police officers and Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). 

In response, Trump’s lawyers argued that the former president was in no way responsible for Jan. 6 and that what he said that day was protected by the First Amendment. 

Wallace’s opinion carefully recounts the testimony from both sides. Under American law, her findings of fact are entitled to great deference from appellate courts because she heard the evidence and could assess witness credibility. 

The court’s extensive findings include “Trump’s history with political extremists.” The court noted that “violent far right extremists understood that Trump’s calls to “‘fight’… were . . . literal calls to violence by these groups, while Trump’s statements negating that sentiment . . . existed to . . .  create plausible deniability.”  

Judge Wallace determined that “Trump knew his violent supporters understood his statements this way, and… were intended to incite violence” and “planted the seed” for the storming of the Capitol. Notably, she also found that “Trump knew he had lost the election.” 

The judge highlights what Trump did as the Capitol siege unfolded. She notes that his video at 4:17 pm that day served to “endorse the actions of the mob in trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power. It did not condemn the mob but instead . . . praised them.”  

In building to her conclusion, Judge Wallace finds that at the time of the 14^th Amendment’s ratification, “insurrection” was understood “to refer to any public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the execution of law.” What Trump did and said, Wallace concludes, qualifies under that definition. 

The next stop is the Colorado Supreme Court. While it must defer to the trial court’s factual findings, the higher court is completely free to reverse her legal conclusions that Trump was not a federal “officer” and did not take an oath to “support” the Constitution. After the state court makes its determinations, the case is bound for the U.S. Supreme Court.  

In the meantime, we should not underestimate the significance of this moment. The Colorado court has put on the record what the former president has long denied, namely that Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection designed to overthrow the American Constitution and keep him in office in defiance of the people’s will. 

As historian Timothy Snyder reminds us, “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” Because Judge Wallace has stood firmly by the facts, she delivered a decisive rebuke to those in our own country who would “abandon freedom” by ignoring the truth of what Donald Trump did on Jan. 6. 

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Amherst College.  

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and civil litigator, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy. 

Residents of Russia’s Bryansk region say local authorities orchestrated a massive cover-up to conceal the fact that the war has come to Russian territory and they can’t do anything to stop it.

The independent outlet Verstka on Wednesday published interviews with several residents who say a Russian border guard was killed last week when the governor claimed to have fended off a Ukrainian attack.

“Even the local newspaper wrote that there were no fatalities. There was not a word about the death, but more than a thousand people came to the funeral,” Tatyana Pashechko was quoted saying of her brother, Sergei Listratenko.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

• A private jet company sued Twitter, alleging breach of contract and failure to pay for two flights.
• The flights were "urgent" and authorized ahead of Elon Musk's takeover, the lawsuit said.
• A Twitter exec said the company's new management "wants to hold firm" on not paying, the lawsuit said.

A private jet company sued Elon Musk's Twitter on Friday claiming the social media company refused to pay a $197,725 bill.

Private Jet Services Group (PJS) said Twitter used its charter services for two flights between New Jersey to San Francisco on October 26 and 27 for the company's former chief marketing officer Leslie Berland. Berland booked the flight as Musk's $44 billion purchase agreement neared a close, following months of litigation. The billionaire visited Twitter's San Francisco headquarters on October 26 and completed the deal the following day.

The executive was laid off in November when Musk terminated about half of Twitter's workforce, Bloomberg reported. The publication was the first to report on PJS' lawsuit against Twitter, which was filed in the US District Court of New Hampshire.

PJS is alleging breach of contract and breach of quasi-contract in its lawsuit. The company says in the lawsuit that two Twitter employees booked a flight for Berland to San Francisco and a return flight over email and text. The private jet company later sent Twitter a bill for the two flights in early November, but alleges Twitter never paid.

A Twitter spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication.

Twitter's head of global strategic sourcing, Marty O'Neill, emailed PJS on November 16, saying "Twitter is not liable for these expenses" as "only Designated Representatives" were allowed to book services through PJS, per the complaint.

The lawsuit says that Twitter and PJS signed an agreement in 2020 for the social media company to book services through jet firm via "designated representatives," but Twitter "did not always follow the process" and had allowed employees who were not designated representatives book flights in the past. PJS said Twitter breached its contract by refusing to pay "under circumstances that make it reasonable for PJS to expect payment."

A Twitter employee who booked one of the flights, Taylor DeLorenzo, responded to O'Neill's email in November, saying that then-CEO Parag Agrawal had authorized the flights, according to the lawsuit.

"It was an urgent need the week the deal closed, and Leslie was the main person from Twitter liaising directly with Elon," DeLorenzo's email read, according to the complaint.

O'Neill responded to DeLorenzo's email, saying he "can't emphasize enough that new management wants to hold firm on this," the complaint said.

It's not the first bill that Twitter has allegedly refused to pay since Musk took over. Last month, The New York Times reported that some of the company's vendors and suppliers are owed millions of dollars in back payments. The publication said Musk's staff said the company did not intend to pay for the services as they were authorized by former management, not Musk.

The billionaire has been taking several cost-cutting measures at Twitter in recent months, from laying off hundreds of workers to eliminating free lunches and auctioning office equipment online. Musk has even floated the idea of bankruptcy, warning the "economic picture ahead is dire."

Star Trek Actor Anthony Rapp and partner Ken Ithiphol have announced the birth of their first child. According to Rapp’s post to Twitter, son Rai ...

The post Out Gay Star Trek Actor Anthony Rapp And Partner Ken Welcome First Child appeared first on Star Observer.

I need a plan of action, literally.

MOTU baddie Hordak is getting a new 1/5th scale maquette from Tweeterhead. The statue will come with a wired fabric cape, his staff, and in two versions. The standard comes with his standard head portrait, while the Tweeterhead exclusive will include a classic She-Ra style head. Hordak will stand 21 inches tall and comes posed on a Fright-Zone themed base as well. Tweeterhead is continuing the line of MOTU-themed statues started by Sideshow with this line, starting with the leader of The Evil Horde. You can check out both versions of the statue below.

"There's so much bad to be done!" – Hordak

Tweeterhead Presents the Hordak "Legends" Maquette! The 1:5 scale line originally established by Sideshow, Tweeterhead is bringing back these "Legends" by starting out with everyone's favorite leader of the Evil Horde himself, Hordak! The Hordak Maquette measures close to 21" tall when fully assembled – figure, base, and staff. This polyresin statue comes with his iconic monster portrait clad in his black, crimson and grey costume with a removable fabric cape. Standing atop the horrific Fright-Zone themed base, Hordak is getting ready to exact revenge on Skeletor, He-Man, and conquer all of Eternia!

The "Tweeterhead Exclusive" comes with an additional classic "Robot" style portrait with everything else advertised. Both versions of the Hordak Maquette will retail for $475 USD, and ready for Pre-Order this Thursday at noon pst!"

As stated above, both versions of this Hordak statue go on sale tomorrow at 3 PM EST/Noon PST. Both versions will run $475 a piece, and with that being the case you would be foolish to not just order the exclusive version. Hopefully this means we can get a bunch of new MOTU related characters in this scale, the Sideshow line was pretty great, and it was sad to see it go.

The post MOTU Villain Hordak Maquette Coming From Tweeterhead appeared first on Bleeding Cool News And Rumors.

Immigration Equality, Lambda Legal, and pro bono counsel Morgan Lewis have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department for refusing to recognize the citizenship of the daughter of married U.S. citizens Roee and Adiel Kiviti, a gay couple.

Lambda Legal explains: “Roee and Adiel Kiviti are a same-sex couple who married in California in 2013. They had their daughter Kessem via surrogacy in Canada in February 2019. Because only Adiel has a biological connection to Kessem, the State Department is disregarding Roee and Adiel’s marriage and treating Kessem as ‘born out of wedlock,’ meaning she must have a biological relationship to a U.S. citizen parent who has resided in the U.S. for five years. This requirement is not meant to be applied to the children of married U.S. citizens. Even though both of Kessem’s fathers are U.S. citizens, Adiel falls one year short of the residency requirement, and the State Department completely disregards Roee as her father.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Maryland.

Said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Senior Attorney at Lambda Legal: “Kessem was born to two dads. By refusing to recognize Kessem as a U.S. citizen at birth, the Department of State seeks to erase her family ties and to disrespect Roee’s and Adiel’s marriage. This is not only unlawful, it is also cruel and un-American. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that same-sex couples are entitled to the same constellation of benefits linked to marriage as different-sex couples. The government cannot refuse to recognize Roee’s and Adiel’s marriage, nor Kessem’s citizenship at birth. We will fight for the dignity of all LGBT families.”

Added Aaron C. Morris, Executive Director of Immigration Equality: “This is a fight for marriage equality. It is a fight for the fundamental right of citizenship. By refusing to recognize their rights as a married couple, the State Department is treating Roee and Adiel as second-class citizens and treating Kessem as if she is not a citizen at all. The administration has made abundantly clear it will ignore the law and Constitution. We will not stand for it.” 

Lambda Legal adds: “The Immigration and Nationality Act states that children of married U.S. citizens born abroad are U.S. citizens from birth so long as one of their parents has resided in the U.S. at some point, but the State Department routinely denies that right to same-sex couples and their children. While different-sex couples are automatically presumed to both be parents of their children, same-sex couples are subjected to invasive questioning about how they brought their child into their family. Because one parent is not a biological parent, they are treated as if they are not married, and their children are not recognized as citizens unless the biological parent can meet additional criteria”

Said plaintiffs Roee and Adiel Kiviti: “The focus here is our little girl whose rights are being infringed upon by our government. Every parent wants to protect their child, to give them assurances of tomorrow, and this policy isn’t letting us do that. Our daughter will know her story. She will know how she came into this world, she will know about all of the loving people who helped us become a family, and she will know how her parents fought for her rights and for the rights of other families.”

The lawsuit follows a similar suit filed in July by Immigration Equality, Lambda Legal, and pro bono counsel in the Northern District of Georgia against the U.S. State Department. That lawsuit was filed on behalf of another same-sex couple, Derek and Jonathan Mize-Gregg, whose daughter Simone was not recognized as a U.S. citizen under the discriminatory policy.

The post Gay Maryland Couple Sues State Department for Denying Citizenship to ‘Out-of-Wedlock’ Daughter appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Bloomberg reports:

President Donald Trump has asked advisers their opinions about nominating Utah Senator Mike Lee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, according to three people familiar with the matter. Trump thinks Lee would be easily confirmed by the Senate, but the president has expressed concern about keeping his Senate seat in Republican hands, one person said. All of the people spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.

He has been assured the seat will remain safely Republican, the person said. Trump complained that he was told the same about the Alabama Senate seat held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who wound up replaced by Democrat Doug Jones. Trump is actively considering other candidates. Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, is said to be another top contender.

Back in March, Lee reintroduced the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, which would make it legal nationwide to refuse to serve LGBT citizens based on “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.” His bill, which has not yet been reintroduced in the House, currently has 22 GOP Senate cosponsors.

The post REPORT: Trump Seeks Advice On Naming Mike Lee To SCOTUS, Worries About Senate Seat Getting Flipped appeared first on Joe.My.God..

A school has defended its decision to dismiss a teacher for being gay.

Available on Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Roku.

The Lt. Governor insists that asking the Family Research Council to promote a bill to limit bathroom access to the gender on one's birth certificate is not transphobia.

On last night’s Scream Queens, actors John Stamos and and Glen Powell stripped down–and apparently oiled up–for a steamy shower scene.

Stamos and Powell play rich and handsome doctors on the second season of Ryan Murphy’s horror spoof series.

In the scene, Stamos explains the “Dateable Guy Checklist” to Powell and Powell tries to intimidate Stamos with his manhood.

As EW notes, Stamos took to Twitter on Tuesday night to talk about the filming of the scene:

“Well yeah, it could have been awkward. It was pretty awkward, but Glen is so damn funny. I at least wore a G-string or something, but he wore a very tiny… a medium-sized sock,” Stamos said. “We laughed a whole lot. We did a lot of pushups; he likes to do pushups. He likes a lot of oil, there’s a lot of oiling up. I swear we ran out of oil on that scene.”

.@K1989Kell #screamqueens pic.twitter.com/YbURLHRLwr

— John Stamos (@JohnStamos) September 28, 2016

Stamos also posted a more revealing photo of him and Powell covering their members with a Dick’s Sporting Goods sign.

He wrote on Twitter, “‘I think our wieners just touched, accidentally.’ (was it really an accident  @glenpowell ??”

"I think our wieners just touched, accidentally." (was it really an accident @glenpowell ?? #ScreamQueens pic.twitter.com/QF5CAPLel5

— John Stamos (@JohnStamos) September 28, 2016

Watch the scene, below.

[h/t Just Jared]

The post John Stamos and Glen Powell Strip Down and Hit the Showers on ‘Scream Queens’ – WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.

His “Muslim ban” shift sells out his core constituents.

This is an awkward thing to admit: I actually took Donald Trump at his word about something.

Not much, mind you. Just two things. As much as he might flip-flop with abandon, and lie with ease, about most campaign issues, I figured that two things would remain: He would promise to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it, and he would promise to ban Muslims from entering the US "until we figure out what's going on."

But the minute he sewed up the GOP nomination in early May, he started showing signs of softening on the Muslim ban — telling interviewers that it was "just a suggestion", that "it hasn’t been called for yet." By June 14, in a speech after the mass shooting in Orlando, the ban would apply to "areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies."

By late June, the Trump campaign officially admitted that President Trump wouldn’t ban Muslims from entering the US unless they came from one of the "terror states." A few days later, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson was insisting that the candidate had never called to ban all Muslims at all.

Of course, that is exactly what Trump did. Explicitly and repeatedly. For pete's sake, it was the focus of his very first television campaign ad.

It's not that I'm surprised Trump is lying about something. (If I were, I should probably be either checked for memory loss or fired.) But I'm really surprised that one of the two things I thought he'd never back down on is one of the first things that, as he "pivots" to the general election, he's signaling a willingness to move away from.

And I'm left to wonder: Who is Donald Trump even running as anymore?

Trump has successfully marketed himself as a bold, un-PC truth teller

It is clear to me that Donald Trump accidentally fell into a serious presidential run. The truest statement you can make about his campaign for the Republican nomination is that he micromanages his communications strategy — his marketing — and leaves his staff and surrogates scrambling to fill in the rest, if it gets filled in at all.

He flip-flops with abandon (on issues like taxes) and breaks gleefully with GOP orthodoxies (like George W. Bush "keeping us safe") because, as much as anything, he just doesn't give a damn about policy.

But for all this, he managed to stumble onto a constituency. His comments about Mexicans during his campaign speech did exactly what political communications consultants tell their clients to do. It provoked the opposition (liberal and mainstream media) and galvanized a base: people who felt repulsed by immigration and oppressed by "political correctness."

That wasn't Trump's base when he said it. But it became his base. And that base has stuck with him throughout the campaign, as the rest of the Republican Party failed to find an alternative to him and then talked themselves into more or less actively supporting him.

Trump's willingness to speak bluntly on delicate subjects is core to his appeal. When I spoke to Trump voters in the northern suburbs of Boston, it was the most common theme I heard. "A lot of things that American families say behind closed doors, he's willing to say out loud," one Trump supporter told me.

And the particular truths they cherish Trump speaking are about immigrants and Muslims. When one Trump supporter told me Trump was "actually saying things that we probably would not be comfortable doing ourselves," I asked him what sort of things he meant; his reply was, "The whole thing with the Muslim issue. That we should be screening them. I support that."

I figured that Trump understood that. I figured it was why his campaign always seemed one step more developed on immigration than it was on any other issue. I figured that's why those had been the issues he featured in his primary ad. (For more on Trump's proposed Muslim ban and its history, read our previous coverage.)

Even when Trump put a wrecking ball to a core pillar of his candidacy last month by agreeing to accept outside funding in the general election (after months of saying that he was uniquely trustworthy because he didn't let anyone give him money), I was amused but not alarmed — Trump's supporters care about his independence, sure, but not as much as they care about Trump's "hard truths."

Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

With the "Muslim ban" no longer a Muslim ban, Donald Trump is running for office promising to do exactly one thing: to build a wall on the US-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it.

Except that Trump has already signaled, on a couple of occasions, that he only needs the wall built along about half of the border — which is barely more security than his Republican competitors were calling for or, for that matter, than the US has now.

With five months left in the campaign, what else might Trump promise to do, or even try to do, once elected president? What is he asking his voters to trust him for? What is left to Donald Trump?

A "negotiating" stance is an easy way to avoid commitment — but avoiding commitment diminishes the Trump brand

In fairness, Trump has been admirably forthright about the flexibility of his policy proposals. He's said over and over again that he's a dealmaker, a negotiator, and that therefore any policy he proposed should be taken no more seriously than an opening bid — a "suggestion."

Many of the Trump supporters I talked to either weren't aware of this or didn't care. They believed fervently that Trump's bluntness meant he was unusually sincere. "He's not a politician. He's not a smooth talker. What he says is what he's going to do," one said. "There's a lot of similarity between Trump and Reagan," said another, "because they say what they're going to do and they do it."

That's not necessarily Trump's fault. As the candidate himself likes to say on the stump (albeit referring to immigrants, not to himself), "You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in."

It's not at all clear that Trump is actually backing off his Muslim-ban proposal so much as bringing it in line with the rest of his policy proposals: an opening offer to get someone (Congress? other countries? Paul Ryan?) to the table and hash things out.

That saves Trump's skin with political reporters who care about policy: The best way to avoid getting accused of flip-flopping is never to say anything specific enough to be reversible. But that's not the constituency Trump cares about anyway, or else he would, you know, flip-flop less.

(Trump)

But the thing about being a "negotiator" is that you don't cut a deal just to cut a deal. That's a good way to cut a lot of bad deals. It is, in fact, exactly what Donald Trump is accusing President Obama of when it comes to his 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

When you negotiate, you can't just have an opening bid in mind. You have to have a closing one, too. And while Donald Trump is just speaking out of a best-business-practices playbook when he refuses to tell anyone what his actual goals are in negotiation, because he doesn't want to tip his hand to the competition, at this point there is simply no way of knowing what he would actually go into a negotiation hoping to get out of it, what his top priorities and deal breakers for America would be.

If the Muslim ban isn't that, what is?

This gets to the other problem with the "negotiation" framework. There are plenty of Donald Trump supporters who don't think of the Muslim ban as a policy promise first and foremost; they think of it as an uncomfortable truth about the danger of the modern world. They support Donald Trump because even when the Republican "establishment" wants him to stop speaking out about these truths, he refuses to do it.

That’s not about policy as much as it is about communications. And communications is what is most important to Trump anyway. But over the last couple of weeks, it appears that the political insiders — the Republican establishment — have finally taken over the Trump messaging machine.

Trump’s Twitter account has started to read like a campaign account (at least sometimes). He gave an entire speech about Hillary Clinton without calling her "Crooked Hillary" once.

The candidate still overrules his handlers to let reporters tag along with him on a golf course, and the things he says over 18 holes might sound like vintage Trump — but they’re not. Trump still goes on Sean Hannity’s show and talks about how Muslim Americans aren’t assimilating, but he’s not willing to back it up with action. In other words, he’s taking one of his boldest, harshest truths, and treating it as something that might not be such a big deal after all.

It is, quite literally, an act of political correctness.

Watch: Islamophobia in America goes much deeper than Donald Trump.