Posts Tagged ‘ Trump ’

How to manipulate Donnie from Queens

Nov 30th, 2016 11:24 am | By

William Saletan has advice on how to deal with the pathetic needy narcissist that is Trump.

To understand Trump, you have to set aside the scripted speeches he gave before his election and the canned videos he has released since. You also have to set aside the caricature of him as a Klan-loving, Nazi-sympathizing woman hater who will deport every immigrant he can find. Instead, look at the four interviews he has given since his election: to the Wall Street Journal, 60 Minutes, the New York Times, and a group of TV anchors and executives. In these exchanges, all of them conducted outside the behavior-warping context of the campaign, you’ll see how squishy he is. Trump did

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Puffing the name

Nov 30th, 2016 10:53 am | By

Damn, I missed one. Too busy documenting his tweets, no doubt. Ten days ago he met with three business partners from India, who tweeted a photo of the four of them thumbs-upping.

President-elect Donald J. Trump met in the last week in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai, raising new questions about how he will separate his business dealings from the work of the government once he is in the White House.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump described the meeting as a courtesy call by the three Indian real estate executives, who flew from India to congratulate Mr. Trump on his election victory. In

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Trump vows to cover his ass

Nov 30th, 2016 9:06 am | By

The Times has another cruel headline about Trump, although this one won’t bother him because he won’t get it.

Trump Vows Steps to Avoid Appearance of Business Conflicts

Precisely. He’s throwing a damp kleenex over his business conflicts, but not, of course, actually terminating them. He’s hoping to conceal them; he’s not in the least hoping to do away with them.

The headline is pretty funny, really, despite the horror of the reality behind it. Trump promises to try to hide how corrupt he is. Cool, bro, thanks.

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday said he would take steps to separate himself from his vast, global business empire in the hopes of preventing the appearance of a conflict of

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Inspired by Trump

Nov 30th, 2016 8:27 am | By

In Florida:

A white Florida man has been charged with battery after he was accused of punching an Hispanic man in the back of the head “for Donald Trump.”

It happened in a parking lot behind a grocery store in Gainesville.

According to a police report obtained by Egberto Willies, Caleb Joseph Illig arrived at the parking lot at around 1:10 a.m. and began punching Pablo Echevarria in the back of the head.

The report said that Illig shouted, “Let’s Trump down,” as he punched Echevarria. When Echevarria asked why he was being attacked, Illig reportedly replied, “This is for Donald Trump.”

Trump the warrior against political correctness. Now that political correctness has been defeated, it’s cool for … Read the rest



To address any issues

Nov 30th, 2016 8:16 am | By

Trump is going to be in violation of his lease with the GSA the minute he becomes president.

The new Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., is in a historic federal building. A government agency called the General Services Administration, or GSA, negotiated the lease with the Trump Organization. And that lease includes this language: No elected official shall be admitted to any share or part of this lease or to any benefit that may arise there from.

Steven Schooner is a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University Law School; he read the lease and says it means what the words say.

I think that the only logical or reasonable reading of that language

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The Fascist rallies start tomorrow

Nov 30th, 2016 7:34 am | By

Trump’s Triumph of the Will tour has a shiny pretty logo.

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Monitoring

Nov 29th, 2016 3:58 pm | By

Aaron Blake at the Washington Post also says no we shouldn’t ignore Trump’s tweets.

Undergirding the idea that Trump’s tweets shouldn’t be big news is the theory that he’s manipulating the media into focusing on small things to cover up less sexy but more important things — conflicts of interests and possible corruption, in particular.

I’m skeptical any such plan exists, given that Trump’s thin-skinned tweeting is pretty indiscriminate. But this idea has returned with a vengeance given the latest tweetstorm, and it’s likely to perk up again after Trump on Tuesday morning suggested revoking the citizenship or jailing of people who burn the American flag.

What we’re basically talking about here is treating Trump like

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A fire lit to hypnotize us

Nov 29th, 2016 3:14 pm | By

Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune also called Trump a liar.

On Sunday, the man who will soon lead this country tweeted a lie — a big, fiery one. It read: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

That statement is based on nothing. Actually, it’s based on less than nothing. Its origin is, roughly, this: A nobody Republican with zero credibility or evidence tweeted that 3 million people voted illegally; a conspiracy theory website reported on that tweet, taking it as fact; the president-elect, in need of a distraction, tweeted that information as fact with no citation, not that a

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Trump v the Constitution

Nov 29th, 2016 1:10 pm | By

The Times also reports on Trump’s jolly tweet about how he’d like to punish people who burn flags.

“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” Mr. Trump wrote in a 6:55 a.m. Twitter post.

Mr. Trump wrote the post shortly after Fox News aired a segment about a dispute at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, which removed the American flag from its campus flagpole after protests over his election victory; during one demonstration, someone burned a flag.

Ah, so that’s what he’s doing – watching Fox News and blurting out tweets in response to what he sees.

Even if Mr.

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Reporting on the L word

Nov 29th, 2016 12:40 pm | By

I mentioned that newspapers like the Times don’t call people liars lightly. For corroboration, here’s the Independent reporting on the very fact that the Times called Trump a liar.

The headline is: New York Times brands Donald Trump a liar

The New York Times has publicly accused Donald Trump of lying after he claimed millions of people had voted illegally in the US presidential election.

The New York Times used an editorial on Monday to attack Mr Trump’s claims.

In the piece, published under the byline of the paper’s Editorial Board, it said: “This is a lie, part of Mr. Trump’s pattern, stretching back many years, of disregard for indisputable facts.

“There is no evidence of illegal voting

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On the road again

Nov 29th, 2016 12:27 pm | By

He’s really doing it. He really is doing more rallies, even though the election is over – because that’s where he gets the instant gratification of people cheering him right in his face. It’s all he wants, along with the many many opportunities to boost his profits.

Donald Trump will once more feel the love that unexpectedly propelled him to victory over Hillary Clinton three weeks ago with a so-called ‘Thank You Tour’ of public appearances starting with a giant rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Thursday night.

While there is so far no published tour schedule, the director of Mr Trump’s advance planning team, George Gigicos, has said that that the president-elect will be traveling “obviously to the states

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The L word

Nov 29th, 2016 9:51 am | By

The Times again says Trump has been telling lies, which is something newspapers don’t do lightly.

On Sunday, President-elect Trump unleashed a barrage of tweets complaining about calls for recounts or vote audits in several closely contested states, and culminating in this message: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

This is a lie, part of Mr. Trump’s pattern, stretching back many years, of disregard for indisputable facts. There is no evidence of illegal voting on even a small scale anywhere in the country, let alone a systematic conspiracy involving “millions.” But this is the message that gets hammered relentlessly

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There is no getting better

Nov 28th, 2016 6:27 pm | By

N Ziehl on coping with an apparent narcissist in the White House.

I want to talk a little about narcissistic personality disorder. I’ve unfortunately had a great deal of experience with it, and I’m feeling badly for those of you who are trying to grapple with it for the first time because of our president-elect, who almost certainly suffers from it or a similar disorder. If I am correct, it has some very particular implications for the office. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1) It’s not curable and it’s barely treatable. He is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to “rise to the occasion” for more

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Oversight

Nov 28th, 2016 12:06 pm | By

There’s a thing called the Goldwater Rule which applies to members of the American Psychiatric Association; it says they can’t diagnose someone they haven’t personally evaluated.

The Goldwater Rule is published as an annotation in the Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry. I encourage you all to read the full text of the rule below, and keep it in mind during this election cycle, and other events of similarly intense public interest.

The “Goldwater Rule:”

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his

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Aren’t all politicians?

Nov 28th, 2016 11:38 am | By

The Washington Post asked in late July Is Trump a textbook narcissist?

For the four days of the Republican convention, the word “narcissism” was never more in vogue, but what does the word actually mean? More importantly, what would it mean for America if one of the nominees for president of the United States is a narcissist? Aren’t all politicians?

The way Trump is? No, certainly not.

Arguably they can’t be, because politics doesn’t work that way. Trump’s election is an anomaly. People who put their own ego ahead of everything else are going to put people off, and their political careers won’t get off the ground. Trump is an “outsider,” which means he didn’t do any political work to … Read the rest



If he’s that out of control

Nov 28th, 2016 10:09 am | By

The Washington Post edges up to the task of discussing Trump’s pathological narcissism.

Trump’s frustration that he’ll be inaugurated despite having less demonstrated support than his opponent is the most likely explanation for his tweets. He’s clearly annoyed that Clinton agreed to participate in Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s efforts to review balloting in Wisconsin and other Midwestern states (an annoyance also made clear on Twitter). It’s remarkably similar to what happened when he lost the Iowa caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.): At first, he accepted the result as it was. Within a day or two, though, he began lashing out at Cruz, accusing him of stealing the vote in the state.

Of course, there’s no evidence that

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Verified? Really?

Nov 28th, 2016 9:47 am | By

The Washington Post dug into the likely source of Trump’s wild claim that millions of people voted illegally.

On Nov. 13, Gregg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner, tweeted about there being 3 million votes that were cast by noncitizens.

https://twitter.com/JumpVote/status/797843232436748288

Phillips hasn’t provided any evidence for that claim. InfoWars and Drudge picked it up, but Drudge labeled it a “claim.”

When Matt Drudge qualifies something with “Claim:,” it’s worth treating it with skepticism.

The rumor-debunking site Snopes looked at Phillips’s claim and found no evidence for it. (It also noted that Phillips has a history of implying that Obamacare will lead to the registration of millions of immigrants here illegally.) Phillips replied on Twitter,

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Live above the rest

Nov 27th, 2016 5:50 pm | By

New details on the conflicts of interest.

On Thanksgiving Day, a Philippine developer named Jose E. B. Antonio hosted a company anniversary bash at one of Manila’s poshest hotels. He had much to be thankful for.

In October, he had quietly been named a special envoy to the United States by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Mr. Antonio was nearly finished building a $150 million tower in Manila’s financial district — a 57-story symbol of affluence and capitalism, which bluntly promotes itself with the slogan “Live Above the Rest.” And now his partner on the project, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.

After the election, Mr. Antonio flew to New York for a

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With no evidence

Nov 27th, 2016 5:27 pm | By

The Times basically says that Trump is lying.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Sunday that he had fallen short in the popular vote in the general election only because millions of people had voted illegally, leveling his claim — despite the absence of any such evidence — as part of a daylong storm of Twitter posts voicing anger about a three-state recount push.

That’s a cautious way of putting it, of course, but their meaning is pretty clear.

The series of posts came one day after Hillary Clinton’s campaign said it would participate in a recount effort being undertaken in Wisconsin, and potentially in similar pushes in Michigan and Pennsylvania, by Jill Stein, who was the

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More Twitter lies from Trump

Nov 27th, 2016 4:33 pm | By

Trump has lit up social media again.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.

I offered him my quick thought on the subject:

What if we add the millions of people whose votes were suppressed in defiance

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