If something seems too good to be true, it's probably because it is.

President Trump congratulated his eldest child last week for hitting the top of The New York Times' bestseller list with his book Triggered. But as was pointed out at the time, Donald Trump Jr.'s rise to the top of the list was in part due to an unknown number of bulk sale purchases — leading some people to believe he bought his way into the ranks.

As Times reporter Nick Confessore noted Thursday, Trump Jr.'s book did in fact get a pretty hefty sales boost — from the Republican National Committee. A Federal Election Commission disclosure reportedly shows the RNC made an expenditure to Books-a-Million totaling $94,800 one week before Triggered was released. The disbursement, which was identified as being for "donor mementos," was reportedly connected to the promotion of Trump Jr.'s book.

Books-a-Million, which held a fundraiser at the beginning of the month for Triggered, is listing copies of the book for $23.09 online, which comes out to a little over 4,000 copies given the RNC's payment.

An RNC spokesperson previously told Confessore the committee had "not made a large bulk purchase" but was ordering copies of Triggered in order to "keep up with demand."

As Confessore points out, the situation is a sweet deal for both the RNC and Trump Jr. One makes $500,000 off of promotional deals with donors, and the other becomes a New York Times best-selling author. Marianne Dodson

If you've followed coronavirus research developments since the pandemic began, you're probably aware there have been quite a few clinical trials and studies aimed at finding a treatment or prevention for COVID-19. In fact, Stat News reports there have been 1,200 designed since January, which is a remarkable number in such a short amount of time. The problem is a lot of them are fatally flawed, a new analysis conducted by Stat found.

Robert Califf, the head of clinical policy and strategy at Verily Life Sciences and Google Health who previously served as commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration, said the analysis shows many studies are too small to answer questions (39 percent are enrolling or plan to enroll fewer than 100 patients), lack real control groups, and emphasized a few potential treatments (one out of every six focused on the President Trump-favored malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine) too frequently. "If the goal was to optimize the likelihood of figuring out the best treatment options, the system is off course," he told Stat.

Martin Landray, a professor of medicine at Oxford University and a member of one of the more successful studies known as RECOVERY, said "it's a huge amount of wasted effort and wasted energy." To correct that, Landray and other experts have called for more "coordination and collaboration" across the globe. Read more at Stat News. Tim O'Donnell

The Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes have won at least a temporary victory in their fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The more-than-1,000-mile oil pipeline must be shut down and drained of oil within 30 days, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg of the Washington, D.C. circuit ruled Monday. The pipeline was built and "oil commenced flowing" without a required environmental impact statement, Boasberg wrote in his opinion, meaning the pipeline will need to be shut down at least until that happens.

The pipeline runs from North Dakota's shale fields to Illinois, traveling under the Missouri River along the way. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe contended a leak in the pipe could contaminate their drinking water and otherwise runs through their sacred lands, prompting massive protests and a violent crackdown in 2016. The pipeline's construction was fast-tracked under the Trump administration, and was allowed to commence even without an environmental impact statement mandated under the National Environmental Policy Act.

In response, the tribes launched a lawsuit against Dakota Access and the Army Corps of Engineers. Dakota Access argued shutting down the pipeline would cut their profits and force them to lay off workers, but Boasberg still ruled in the tribes' favor on Monday. The Corps failed to "substantiate" their reasoning for not including the impact statement, Boasberg said, however his decision still leaves the door open for Dakota Access to resume running the pipeline following further review. Kathryn Krawczyk

As new COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to rise in the United States, White House officials are reportedly crossing their fingers that Americans will simply get used to it.

President Trump's advisers are looking to "reframe" his coronavirus pandemic response, and they want to "convince Americans that they can live with the virus," with White House officials hoping "Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day," The Washington Post reports. One senior administration official said Americans will have to "live with the virus being a threat," while a former official told the Post, "They're of the belief that people will get over it or if we stop highlighting it, the base will move on and the public will learn to accept 50,000 to 100,000 new cases a day."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently said the U.S. could soon reach this shockingly high number of 100,000 new cases a day while also warning that the final death toll will be "very disturbing." The U.S. has reported almost 130,000 deaths from COVID-19 and has been setting records for the number of new cases per day.

NBC News similarly reports the White House is preparing a new message on COVID-19 that the country must "learn to live with it." Trump has faced a declining approval rating during the pandemic, with Bloomberg reporting on Monday that support for Trump "is slipping fastest in the 500 counties where the number of cases have been more than 28 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people." Meanwhile, the Post reports that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden's campaign plans to keep attacking Trump for his COVID-19 response, arguing that, as one adviser put it to the Post, "the country would be in a much different place today ... if Joe Biden had been the president in January." Brendan Morrow

The Supreme Court settled a long-running Electoral College controversy Monday when it unanimously ruled that electors must vote as state laws direct in presidential elections.

Most states, save for Nebraska and Maine, which rely in part on congressional district voting, require electors to pledge to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the state's popular vote, but there's long been a debate about whether the pledges can actually be enforced when it's time to vote. In the past, including in 2016, a few "faithless electors" have gone rogue and voted their conscience, although this has never actually altered the final outcome of a presidential race.

Lower courts have ruled differently on the issue in recent years, but the Supreme Court has settled the matter for now. That doesn't mean the Electoral College is immune from change going forward, however. States will have the ability to enforce their requirements, but they can always alter those directives. As NBC News notes, more than a dozen states have ratified an interstate agreement that, should it ever go into effect, would assign all of their electors to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. Read more at The New York Times and NBC News. Tim O'Donnell

Michaela Coel is proud of Chewing Gum, the comedy TV series she wrote and starred in that shot her to fame. But her time making the show was filled with "professional challenges" from the first day, E. Alex Jung writes in a profile of Coel for Vulture. So when it came to selling I May Destroy You, her 12-episode HBO/BBC series, Coel had a few priorities.

Both before Chewing Gum began filming and again before its second season, executives at Fremantle Media refused to make Coel an executive producer, she tells Vulture. And the problems only continued from there: Black cast members were confined to one trailer, some weren't called by their names, the list goes on. Coel ultimately opted against making a third season of the show.

By spring 2017, Coel was pitching her next series, I May Destroy You, which is based on a time she was drugged and sexually assaulted while on a break from writing Chewing Gum. Right off the bat, Netflix offered Coel $1 million for the show — but with a huge catch. Coel wanted to retain a percentage of the copyright to the show, but Netflix wouldn't even give her an outright answer on if they'd let her retain half a percent of those rights, Coel recalled.

Coel went on to pitch I May Destroy You to BBC, and the next day, she got an email ensuring she'd have full rights to the show, as well as full creative control. Still, Coel had "been so untrustworthy of the industry" that she took a day to think about the deal, she tells Vulture, before adding "It's an amazing email." Read the whole profile at Vulture. Kathryn Krawczyk

President Trump is lashing out at NASCAR and Bubba Wallace, the series' only Black driver.

Trump in a tweet on Monday morning complained about NASCAR's "flag decision," referring to its announcement last month that it would ban display of the Confederate flag from all events, and claimed this contributed to NASCAR's "lowest ratings EVER." In fact, The Daily Beast's Lachlan Markay notes this was not the case with ratings for NASCAR's recent Xfinity race over the weekend.

Trump also demanded an apology from Bubba Wallace for an incident in June, when NASCAR said a noose was found in his garage stall. The FBI later said Wallace wasn't the target of a hate crime and that a "garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose" had been in that position since October.

But while Trump called for Wallace to apologize for what he called "just another HOAX," USA Today notes Wallace himself "wasn’t even the person who found the noose." Instead, it was a crew member who did so. Wallace in a statement after the FBI's conclusion said he was "relieved" that "this wasn't what we feared it was."

Trump's tweet comes after he said he "won't even consider" renaming bases that are named after Confederate officers. With tweets like the one he sent off Monday morning, NBC News' Benjy Sarlin writes, "'I was going to vote for Joe Biden, but then I realized he's not for the Confederate flag' is a demographic that the president seems really convinced is real and in urgent need of political attention." Brendan Morrow