He knew

Jul 14th, 2018 3:46 pm | By

The choreography of the whole thing was interesting. Trump went bopping off to Europe to insult more allies and fantasize aloud about his future friendship with Putin…when all the time he knew about the indictments that were in the pipeline.

President Trump had been aware all along about the charges against Russian actors, and had been briefed on them by the Justice Department even before he left for Europe. “The President is fully aware of the department’s actions today,” Rosenstein told reporters as he announced the indictments, which lay out in methodical detail the ways in which agents of the Russian government systematically worked to infiltrate the Democrats’ 2016 campaign with the apparent goal of helping Trump win the American Presidency.

Trump knew the indictment was coming when he bragged about what an easy meeting he would have with Putin. He knew it was coming when he once again attacked the investigation by his own government as “rigged.” And he knew it was coming when he rambled on about an agenda for the Helsinki summit that would cover just about everything but the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Talk about brazen.

Talk about treasonous.

On Friday, the only White House comment after the indictments was not a condemnation of the Russian campaign, as outlined in damning detail in the indictment, to subvert American democracy. No, it was simply a partisan statement of support for the President, noting that all those charged in the case were Russians. “This is consistent with what we have been saying all along,” the statement said.

It’s as if Trump were a literal god-king, and nothing in the world mattered except what Trump wanted.

Democrats in Congress, and at least one Republican—the ever more isolated Senator John McCain—immediately demanded that Trump cancel the Helsinki summit, at least, as McCain put it, “if President Trump is not prepared to hold President Putin accountable.” But, of course, Trump is prepared neither to take Putin to task nor to cancel the summit he has spent months pushing his staff to arrange for him.

And apparently nobody can do anything about it so we just have to sit here and watch him lay waste to everything.

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Threats no problem

Jul 14th, 2018 3:28 pm | By

Also charming.

Except when they are. Some threats are just blowing off steam. Some threats are real and get carried out. They don’t come marked as one or the other.

Because raping “TERFs” to death is just what you do when you get worn down.

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Some echo

Jul 14th, 2018 11:14 am | By

The AP sidles cautiously up to the obvious:

President Donald Trump’s lament this week that immigration is “changing the culture” of Europe echoed rising anti-immigrant feelings on both sides of the Atlantic, where Europe and the United States are going through a demographic transformation that makes some of the white majority uncomfortable.

It doesn’t so much “echo” it as simply express it. Trump is a xenophobic and racist reactionary who detests immigration from anywhere south of Norway. He’s also a mean selfish shit.

Trump, in an interview with the British newspaper The Sun, blamed immigration for a changing culture in Europe: “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”

Trump, the grandson of a German immigrant and the son of a Scottish immigrant to the United States, repeated his contention at a news conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May:

“I just think it’s changing the culture. I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative,” he said. “I think it’s very much hurt other parts of Europe. And I know it’s politically not necessarily correct to say that, but I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture, you are changing a lot of things.”

That is, he knows it’s racist and xenophobic to say that, and he’ll say it loud and often, because he likes to say racist xenophobic things. That’s who and what he is.

Claire M. Massey, a scholar at the Institute for British and North American Studies at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität in Greifswald, Germany, said Trump’s comments were “awfully painful,” especially for the United Kingdom, where immigration has played a key role in rebuilding the country after World War II. “England and the United Kingdom wouldn’t be what it is today without immigrants,” she said.

Massey said Trump’s comments remind her of the rhetoric coming from neo-Nazis in Germany and Poland. The comments will embolden the far-right in Europe at a time when many European nations are already very diverse.

Lisbon, Portugal, for example, is now home to sizable and visible Brazilian, Cape Verdean, and Angolan populations. The immigrant groups and their Portuguese-born children have helped revitalize areas of the cities once in disrepair and have a presence in everything from professional soccer teams to popular culture.

Oh, and guess what all those countries have in common? Portuguese. And for why? Colonialism, aka immigration plus domination.

Paul A. Kramer, a Vanderbilt University historian who specializes in the politics of inequality in the United States, said Trump’s most recent comments were an intentional attempt to ally himself and his base in the United States with the far-right nationalist movements in Europe.

“The rising tide of white nationalism is something that he embraces, that he sees himself as participating in and that he wants to encourage,” Kramer said.

It’s his identity.

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Isn’t lynching kind of fascist?

Jul 14th, 2018 10:46 am | By

There’s this winsome image:

I haven’t been able to find it on that group’s Facebook, so maybe Facebook has now removed it. But it’s interesting that people who seem to consider themselves to be on the left think that is a fine woke lefty image – a lynched woman with the inscription DEAD TERFs. The word “TERF” is a free pass for men to express loathing and contempt for women and be seen as awesomely progressive for doing so.

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It was not just the rudeness

Jul 14th, 2018 10:33 am | By

The Guardian view on Trump’s visit is that it was doomed from the start, because he doesn’t want what Britain wants.

The president undermined Mrs May before he even left America. He bullied and lied at the Nato summit in Brussels. He then gave an explosive and deliberately destabilising interview to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun on the very day of his arrival in Britain.

Deliberately. I don’t know. Maybe, but maybe it was just more loosely Trump’s unerring taste for the mean and vulgar.

But it was not just the rudeness that mattered – though rudeness does matter, a lot, both in personal and in public things. It was the political impact and consequence. That unmistakable consequence is that Mr Trump’s America can no longer be regarded with certainty as a reliable ally for European nations committed to the defence of liberal democracy. That is an epochal change for Britain and for Europe.

Well Trump’s America never could. If anybody said in January 2017 that America could still be regarded with certainty as a reliable ally for European nations committed to the defence of liberal democracy, anybody wasn’t paying attention. Certainty on that question wasn’t reasonable even then.

The Guardian says Theresa May was that anybody.

Everything about this disastrous and embarrassing presidential visit could have been avoided with more thought and more political sense. But Mrs May and her advisers rushed to Washington in January 2017 to offer a state visit to a president who had barely entered the White House, whose measure as an ally they had not yet properly taken, but who already had it in his character and his power to transform the event from a relatively harmless occasion into a deeply wounding one. It was a shameful and stupid misjudgment. The hostile public reaction was immediate and without precedent. Everything that has happened this week confirms that the Trump visit should not have taken place.

Indeed. We said so at the time. “Why is she all over him like a cheap suit?” we said.

Mrs May should have grasped from the very start that Mr Trump was not an ally when it came to her Brexit strategy. Mr Trump wants to break up international organisations like Nato and the EU. He embraced Brexit on that basis. He saw it as the start of a swing back towards nativist, illiberal, often racist nationalist politics, of which his own election was a further example. He made no secret of his wish to promote other nativist movements on the right. Other European leaders understood this danger, notably Angela Merkel. Mrs May failed to do so. Mrs May rightly wanted a close post-Brexit relationship with the EU, a stance that led in time to the Chequers showdown with her Brexiteer ministers a week ago. But she failed to see that Mr Trump’s US has a stronger commitment to the weakening of the EU than it does to a Britain that wants the EU to prosper.

Out of that failure came the Sun interview. In the interview, Mr Trump expressed hatred for the EU, support for hard Brexit, unwillingness to strike a trade deal with the UK, contempt for Mrs May, support for Boris Johnson, hostility to immigration, and offered his barely coded belief that the UK – and Europe – is “losing your culture”. The interview, its content, its timing, and the fact that it was given to Mr Murdoch’s flagship anti-EU tabloid, was a deliberate hostile act. For Mrs May, fighting to control her party on the dominant issue facing Britain, it was simply a stab in the back. But it wasn’t fundamentally personal. It was a declaration of hostility to Britain and Europe and the values they stand for.

I remain agnostic about how deliberate it was…if only because nothing Trump does is really all that deliberate. He does what he likes to do, and he likes doing things like outraging other heads of governments and doubly so if they’re women, and embracing racism, and trolling liberals.

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The glorious cause

Jul 14th, 2018 8:18 am | By

The Trump administration thinks Britain is being most unfair to that nice racist agitator Tommy Robinson.

Sam Brownback, the U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom, complained to the British ambassador in Washington D.C. about the treatment of an English right-wing activist who is in jail for disrupting a trial, according to three sources familiar with the discussion.

Brownback raised the case of the activist known as Tommy Robinson in a June meeting with Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States, according to a British official and two sources close to the organizers of a pro-Robinson demonstration planned for London on Saturday.

Robinson founded the English Defense League, whose hobby is organizing violent demonstrations against Muslim immigrants in the UK. He got busted in Leeds a few weeks ago for making videos about a trial related to child molestation, violating English law that restricts publicity during criminal trials.

Brownback told Darroch that if Britain did not treat Robinson more sympathetically, the Trump administration might be compelled to criticize Britain’s handling of the case, according to the two sources in contact with organizers of the planned pro-Robinson demonstration.

…

Reuters was unable to determine why the top U.S. official responsible for defending religious freedom would try to intervene with the British government on behalf of an activist who has expressed ant-Islamic views.

We’re not Reuters, so we’re free to speculate. My speculation: they don’t want Muslim-hating agitators to be punished, and they want to throw their weight around on the subject.

A spokesman for Hope Not Hate, a British anti-racism group, said, “In the week President Trump comes to the UK, his hand-picked diplomat allying himself with a far-right convicted fraudster perhaps shouldn’t be too much of a shock.”

Would you like a cup of tea?

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#TrumpVisitUK

Jul 13th, 2018 4:25 pm | By

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Attention deficit

Jul 13th, 2018 3:08 pm | By

Here’s an extraordinary thing:

A statement from the White House did not address the allegations of Russian government interference and focused only on what was not in the indictment.

“Today’s charges include no allegations of knowing involvement by anyone on the campaign and no allegations that the alleged hacking affected the election result. This is consistent with what we have been saying all along,” the statement said.

Think about that. I saw tweets quoting the “no allegations” minutes after the story broke, but I neglected to think about them at first.

That’s a statement from the White House about criminal interference with an election – and all it says is “See, it doesn’t say we did it” – it doesn’t say anything about the threat this represents. The White House!

I know it’s not news that the Trump team is all about Trump and not at all about the people of the country, but still that’s jaw-dropping. It’s basically “Haha you haven’t caught us and you never will, haha.” They’re not even pretending to care about the welfare of the country as a whole. They’re a criminal organization rejoicing that they still haven’t been caught.

I haven’t been able to find a written statement so I guess this is something someone said into a microphone. I’d quite like to see their naked self-serving in black and white.

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Look out, me first

Jul 13th, 2018 2:48 pm | By

Piggy goes visiting.

Never even mind that she’s a monarch. She’s his host, she’s his senior, she’s a great deal smaller than he is.

Piggy should stay at home until he can learn to behave.

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Cancel the meeting

Jul 13th, 2018 11:38 am | By

Much of the US government is saying on Twitter that Trump should cancel the meeting with Putin.

Journalists and legal experts agree.

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No Perry Mason

Jul 13th, 2018 10:14 am | By

New charges.

Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, on Friday announced new charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The announcement came just a few days before President Trump is expected to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland.

The 11-count indictment includes charges of conspiracy by the Russian intelligence officials against the United States, money laundering and attempts to break into state boards of elections and other government agencies.

The indictment is part of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trumpniks on Twitter are jumping up and down shouting that none of this has been connected to Trump.

The thing about that is, even if no connection to Trump is ever found, that won’t change the fact that he’s Russia’s chosen candidate, and that’s not for altruistic reasons. Given the closeness of the election it seems likely that without the Russian fixes he would have lost. That’s still important even if his nasty little fingers were not in it.

American intelligence officials and lawmakers are concerned that the Russians are also trying to meddle in the upcoming midterm congressional elections in November. Mr. Trump said on Friday that he planned to tell Mr. Putin when he meets with him to stay out of those elections.

“I know you’ll ask will we be talking about meddling?” Mr. Trump told reporters. “And I will absolutely bring that up. I don’t think you’ll have any, ‘Gee, I did it, I did it, you got me.’ There won’t be a Perry Mason here, I don’t think, but you never know what happens, right? But I will absolutely firmly ask the question. And hopefully we’ll have a very good relationship with Russia.”

Oh, whew, that’s a relief.

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A very sensitive man

Jul 13th, 2018 9:40 am | By

A slice or two from the Sun interview.

Trump has total power. Nobody on his White House staff tells him what to say, or questions him when he says it.

When Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced our scheduled ten-minute slot was almost up, the President swiftly interjected: “No, give them a little bit more.”

We stayed for 28 minutes, with no more prompts to go.

Secondly, he is a very sensitive man, constantly saying how much various people like him. It clearly pains him today that he is not being welcomed to Britain as a hero and our most important ally.

Well, “sensitive” is putting it nicely. It could imply sensitivity toward other people too, and we know that’s not right. Outrage at slights to the self coupled with brutality to all others doesn’t really add up to “sensitive” – it’s more narcissism.

Trump has admitted he “feels unwelcome” in London as a major ­security operation was launched for his arrival in the UK yesterday.

But the tycoon insists real British people “love the President of the United States”.

Mr Trump told The Sun he will be largely staying away from the capital to avoid huge street protests of up to 200,000 today.

But he blamed them on politicians — singling out his nemesis, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

Revealing he has been told of the 20ft “Trump Baby” blimp that will be flown above Parliament Square today, he said: “I guess when they put out blimps to make me feel unwelcome, no reason for me to go to London.

“I used to love London as a city. I haven’t been there in a long time. But when they make you feel unwelcome, why would I stay there?”

Says the whiny baby who publicly insults other people constantly.

Mr Trump added: “You know, a poll just came out that I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party — 92 per cent. Beating Lincoln. I beat our Honest Abe.”

He can’t mention Lincoln without calling him “Honest Abe.” I suppose that’s the only thing he knows about Lincoln.

He thinks quite highly of Brenda.

Mr Trump said: “She is a tremendous woman. I really look forward to meeting her. I think she represents her country so well.

“If you think of it, for so many years she has represented her country, she has really never made a mistake. You don’t see, like, anything embarrassing. She is just an incredible woman.”

If only we could say “you don’t see, like, anything embarrassing” about him.

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Gathering

Jul 13th, 2018 8:55 am | By

Go go go.

The camera pans south to catch the crowd filling every bit of space as far as the eye can see.

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Little method

Jul 13th, 2018 8:27 am | By

Not surprisingly, many European leaders have decided Trump is not so much a calculating enemy as an out of control lunatic moron.

Trump’s wildly unpredictable performance over two days in Brussels left many European leaders convinced that there is little method to the American president’s rhetorical madness, and simply no way to anticipate what he might do next.

“Nobody knows when Trump is doing international diplomacy and when he is doing election campaigning in Montana,” Danish defense minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen said. “It is difficult to decode what policy the American president is promoting. There is a complete unpredictability in this, and one of the things you need in this alliance is predictability towards Russia.”

Well that’s what you get when a real estate promoter slash reality tv personality with zero education or experience in any field relevant to government gets himself elected president of the US, all the more so when the huckster refuses to learn anything at all even after getting elected.

When a Croatian journalist confronted Trump about his inconsistencies, the president flatly denied there were any, and he repeated a defense of his own sanity that he had made when previously questioned about his fitness for the presidency.

“We understand your message, but some people ask themselves, will you be tweeting differently once you board the Air Force One?” the reporter said.

Trump, speaking at his news conference before leaving the summit, replied: “No, that’s other people that do that. I don’t. I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius.”

But of course he does do that, he just did it at the G 7 meeting a couple of weeks ago.

But leaders who spent the first 18 months of Trump’s presidency thinking there might be a method to his chaos creation — and struggling to discern what it might be — now seem to have concluded that it’s just chaos, and that Trump himself may not understand what he’s doing.

While Washington has long ago grown numb to Trump’s unrelenting mayhem, the president’s two days of undulations in Brussels, rolling between enraged criticism and boastful, happy proclamations, left many leaders feeling queasy.

His bouncing makes them seasick.

Us too.

A senior NATO official said leaders had concluded that they simply could not rely on anything Trump said.

“You know the way he speaks, you cannot take him literally,” the official said.

A short summary of that is ” he is a liar.”

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The insults continued for page after lurid page

Jul 13th, 2018 8:07 am | By

It’s going very well, very well.

Donald Trump, straight-talking disruptor-in-chief, grants an interview to the Sun, a newspaper in so many ways the US president’s natural forum. The interviewer’s 10-minute slot stretches to 28; the interviewee is clearly enjoying himself, and the resulting headlines – “May has wrecked Brexit”, “US trade deal is off” – appear slap-bang in the middle of the prime minister’s grand opening effort to convince him of the contrary.

The insults continued for page after lurid page, including dismissive comments about the prime minister’s new plan for Brexit (“I think the deal is not what the people voted on”); about Theresa May’s conduct of the negotiations (“I actually told Theresa May how to do it, but she didn’t listen to me … she wanted to go a different route”); and – dear, oh dear – about the “very talented guy”, Boris Johnson, who “would be “a great prime minister”, whom he was “surprised and saddened” to see leaving government.

Hey, he was just being honest. Fake news!

The conundrum facing No 10 now is whether and how to respond. The sunnily cautious comments of the foreign office minister, Alan Duncan, on the BBC this morning, suggested that the official decision was to grin and bear it, rather than engage in anything more dramatic.

Probably for reasons to do with known outcomes from descent into wet soil to combat Sus domesticus.

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A Yank abroad

Jul 13th, 2018 7:54 am | By

Yes that’s a good look.

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Poor Brenda

Jul 12th, 2018 4:48 pm | By

Trump thinks he’s popular in the UK.

Even as the president’s aides choreographed a visit designed to have Mr. Trump spend as little time as possible in London and to keep him out of sight of any protests, he seemed unfazed.

“I think it’s fine,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Brussels before setting off for a two-day working visit to England followed by a weekend in Scotland.

“They like me a lot in the U.K.,” he added. “They agree with me on immigration. I’m going to a pretty hot spot right now, a lot of resignations.”

Says the guy who’s had more resignations from his administration than any president ever, by a wide margin. Everybody likes him a lot, it’s just that they can’t wait to get away from him.

Mr. Trump has expressed a fondness for British pomp and circumstance, and an admiration for Queen Elizabeth II. He is scheduled to have tea with the queen at Buckingham Palace on Friday.

I hope the Corgis bite him.

At Windsor Castle, west of London, where Mr. Trump and his wife are to meet Queen Elizabeth II, protests are expected. The president and the first lady will then travel to the Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, where they will spend the weekend. But it will hardly be peaceful.

“Donald Trump is not welcome here,” the Scottish Labour and Scottish Green parties said in a statement. “The horrific scenes at the Mexican border are a repudiation of decent human values. Caging children like animals is barbaric. We cannot roll out the red carpet for a U.S. president that treats human beings this way.”

The “Trump Baby” balloon may follow the president to Scotland. Thousands of people have also signed a petition asking permission to fly the balloon over the Turnberry golf course, where the president is expected to play on Saturday.

Please say yes. Please please please.

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Wut thatt

Jul 12th, 2018 4:09 pm | By

Image may contain: 12 people, people smiling

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Portland Place tomorrow

Jul 12th, 2018 12:31 pm | By

Southall Black Sisters is out there protesting Donald.

Here is our banner that we have created especially for Women’s March London #BringTheNoise march, we are meeting at Portland Place from 11 onwards tomorrow, march moves off at 12.30. Join us! We stand in solidarity with all those who will be protesting against Trump’s visit to the UK. In the interlinked and globalised world we live in, Trump as the so-called leader of the so-called free world, isriding a tsunami of racism and misogyny which normalises the resurgence of right wing extremism which we are witnessing across Europe and indeed the world. The intolerable separation of migrant families from their children is not simply going on in the US but also in the UK and other parts of Europe. We want to draw attention to those links and the insidious ways in which US policies resonate internationally. As BME women, we stand up and say: No, not in our name, not on our watch.
Banner created by Shakila Taranum Maan

Image may contain: 1 person, text

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Stable geniosity

Jul 12th, 2018 11:54 am | By

Trump continued his spoiled brat routine all the way to the end.

Even as he declared that the American commitment to the trans-Atlantic alliance “remains very strong” ahead of his summit meeting next week with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, he continued to assail close partners and further strain diplomatic relations.

In the closing hours of the two-day gathering in Brussels with leaders of the other NATO nations, he forced a last minute emergency meeting to address his grievances over spending. Then he called a news conference to claim credit for having pressured NATO members to boost their defense budgets “like they never have before.”

That claim was quickly dismissed by the leaders of both Italy and France, who disputed that they had made any new pledges for boosting spending, adding to the sense of disarray.

…

The White House hastily called the news conference amid reports that Mr. Trump had unleashed a tirade at a closed-door morning meeting against member countries he complained were still not spending enough on their militaries. Mr. Trump used the news conference to hail himself, again, as a “stable genius,” saying he deserved “total credit” for pushing the allies to increase their military spending by more than previously agreed to.

It’s funny that he picks those two qualities to insist on, when he so conspicuously lacks both of them. He’s the stupidest and most chaotic US president any of us have ever seen.

Asked whether Mr. Trump had threatened to leave NATO, Mr. Macron said, “Generally, I do not comment on what goes on behind the scenes, but at no moment did President Trump — neither bilaterally nor multilaterally — say that he was intending to leave NATO.”

Mr. Trump himself said, “It all came together at the end, and yes, it was a little tough for a little while.” He added, “But ultimately, you can ask anybody at that meeting, they’re really liking what happened over the last two days.”

Well, maybe, but if so we haven’t heard about it yet.

Mr. Trump said that, after a weekend in Scotland at Turnberry — a golf course and Trump business that he plugged in the news conference as “magical” — he would go “to a pretty hot spot” to meet with Mr. Putin.

Not supposed to do that. Nope. Not supposed to use official news conferences in his role as president to advertise his golf courses. Nope nope nope.

Currently he’s in the helicopter between Regent’s Park and Blenheim. I hope he’s airsick.

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