It’s interesting how thoroughly terrible the protagonist of this character study is. The terribleness seeps everywhere and gets into all the corners and crevices and tiny little thumbtack holes. No possible terrible is overlooked.

Trump’s temper — honed over years as a public and political persona — hasn’t waned.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions bore the brunt of Trump’s most recently disclosed upbraiding. The New York Times reported this week that Trump, in front of multiple people, called his long-time supporter an “idiot.”

In the West Wing, Trump can be a temperamental commander-in-chief, prone to bursts of anger that dissipate as quickly as they came on. The rage is an extension of what many say they experienced on the campaign trail.

Trump probably got that stupid and venomous claim that the tube bombing was carried out by “sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard” from Fox and Friends.

At 6:42 a.m., Mr. Trump tweeted that “sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard” carried out the explosion, which left 29 people injured in the blast and ensuing panic. It was not clear where Mr. Trump had gotten that information, though 23 minutes earlier, “Fox and Friends,” a program Mr. Trump regularly watches, broadcast a report in which an outside security analyst said the London police probably already knew the identity of the attackers.

“Can someone tell Scotland Yard?” asked Brian Kilmeade,

David Graham at the Atlantic asks a necessary question – why is Trump so speedy at jumping to conclusions about what he takes to be Islamist terrorism and so slow and cautious about a bit of white supremacist terrorism caught on video?

For the second time in a month, President Trump has rushed to condemn a terrorist attack abroad as the work of Islamist terrorists, speaking out before the facts are known even to local officials. Trump’s remarks came just a day after he once again insisted he was right to cast blame on both sides after violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. And they renew the question of why he is so quick to speak with such clarity in

Even Trump’s semi-friends, such as Theresa May, aren’t thanking him for his “proactive!” tweets.

British officials rebuked President Donald Trump on Friday for claiming that the individuals responsible for setting off explosives in the London subway had been “in the sights of” law enforcement who failed to be “proactive.”

Prime Minister Theresa May reproached Trump for his rhetoric in the wake of what police are investigating as a terrorist attack that injured at least 18 people.

“I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation,” she said. “As I’ve just said, the police and security services are working to discover the full circumstances of this cowardly attack and to identify all those responsible.”

Trump is parading his id on Twitter again.

Another attack in London by a loser terrorist.These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017

Must be proactive! he says – meaning, no doubt, that once someone is “in the sights” of Scotland Yard (actually MI5), that someone should be arrested and held indefinitely, no matter how slim or shaky the evidence. Never mind human rights, never mind the law, never mind probabilities: when in doubt throw people in prison and leave them there.

Loser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner.The internet is their main recruitment tool which we must cut

Trump has returned to his “both sides” vomit.

Mr. Trump was characterizing his side of a conversation on Wednesday with Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, during which Mr. Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican, said he confronted the president on his claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence that followed a torchlight protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

“Especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what’s going on there, you know, you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the anti-fascist group that clashed with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

But what you did not have was some … Read the rest

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes on presidential abuse of power in the matter of James Comey:

This afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, from the White House podium, declared that former FBI Director James Comey may have “violated federal law” in sharing a memo documenting a conversation with the president:

The memos that Comey leaked were created on an FBI computer while he was the director. He claims they were private property, but they clearly followed the protocol of an official FBI document. Leaking FBI memos on a sensitive case, regardless of classification, violates federal laws, including the Privacy Act, standard FBI employment agreement and nondisclosure agreements that all personnel must sign. I think that’s pretty clean

Now why would anyone anywhere ever call Trump a white supremacist? I just can’t imagine, can you?

Nobody can.

Donald Trump became a household name by “firing” people on national television; now, it seems his administration is trying to fire people they don’t even employ.

Earlier this week, while ESPN host Jemele Hill was interacting with her followers on Twitter, she called President Trump a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.”

Whereupon the world came to a crashing halt as everyone stared in amazement.

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about Hill’s tweets during her daily briefing on Wednesday, and said they should be considered a “fireable offense.”

“I’m not sure if [Trump’s

The White House press secretary isn’t shy about using her pulpit to attack people.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders set aside some time during the daily press briefing Wednesday to declare that former FBI director James B. Comey should face criminal punishment for allowing negative information about the president to be leaked to the New York Times, and that ESPN reporter Jemele Hill should be fired for her comments about Trump and race.

…

The Comey comment came in response to a question from a reporter, following up on Sanders’s comment Tuesday that Comey had broken the law in asking a friend to leak information from a memo that he’d prepared after a conversation with the president.

A reporter who has the bad taste to be a woman reports on what it was like to cover Trump’s campaign while female.

During his campaign events, Trump often called out the news media, but he delighted in singling out Tur, publicly deriding her as “little Katy” and a “third-rate reporter.” Part of the animosity was in response to Tur’s (accurate) reporting about his behavior at rallies, which prompted him to threaten a boycott of NBC News and to demand an apology. (They settled things over the phone, although Tur is adamant that she did not apologize.) On one occasion, Trump went so far as to kiss her — an unwelcome and uninvited act — just before he

Oh, huh. Guess who pays for it if Mar-a-Lago gets smacked by a hurricane.

The taxpayers.

In the first nine months of his term, America has gotten depressingly used to Donald Trump using his presidency to suck up money for himself. It’s not just the constant Mar-a-Lago trips. Foreign dignitaries are encouraged to stay at the president’s D.C. hotel. Hurricane Harvey photo ops are a chance to plug his latest shit hat. The Secret Service has spent so much money on Trump Tower in New York that the agency can’t even afford to stay there anymore.

But we didn’t know we were insuring his expensive resort.

[A]s the Huffington Post reports, any flood damage Mar-a-Lago sees will likely be

Trump reeeeeeeeeeeally wants to keep out some Mooslims. He gets to do that! He’s the top dude and he gets to!! No stinking lawyers should be able to stop him – they couldn’t build an ugly tower in Manhattan if they tried for a century.

So the Justice Department is pushing it.

The Trump administration is returning to the Supreme Court in an effort to overturn lower court rulings crimping the application of President Donald Trump’s travel ban executive order.

Justice Department lawyers asked the high court Monday to allow authorities to keep up a block on many refugees covered by Trump’s ban.

However, the administration threw in the towel for now on efforts to insist that grandparents, aunts,

Hey, here’s an idea – let’s cut the budgets of disaster relief agencies. Disasters don’t happen, so why budget money to relieve them?

Numerous federal agencies targeted for major budget cuts or even elimination by the Trump administration are playing important roles in helping people recover from Hurricane Harvey along the Gulf Coast. Many agencies in the budget crosshairs also are closely monitoring the path and intensity of Hurricane Irma and making preparations if the storm strikes the United States.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, and other agencies have been responding to Harvey and could be sending staff to Florida later this week if Irma strikes the state. These same employees, as they provide vital services

Ah yes, let’s pretend Trump is an “independent” – as opposed to a ruthless self-serving shit.

President Trump demonstrated this past week that he still imagines himself a solitary cowboy as he abandoned Republican congressional leaders to forge a short-term fiscal deal with Democrats. Although elected as a Republican last year, Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways, the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.

Oh bollocks. All presidents quarrel with their own parties at times. What Trump does isn’t “independence” in that political sense, it’s just a mix of childish self-will and incoherence and … Read the rest

The Republicans have learned what everyone else already knew – that Trump is a narcissistic psychopath who has no scruples of any kind. Trump does what Trump sees as good for Trump, period, end of story.

In agreeing to tie Harvey aid to a three-month extension of the debt ceiling and government funding, Trump burned the people who are ostensibly his allies. The president was an unpredictable — and, some would say, untrustworthy — negotiating partner with not only congressional Republicans but also with his Cabinet members and top aides. Trump saw a deal that he thought was good for him — and he seized it.

The move should come as no surprise to students of Trump’s long history of

Robert Reich on Betsy DeVos’s plan to get rid of Obama’s Title IX guidelines.

Today Education Secretary Betsy DeVos vowed to roll back Obama era guidelines for how colleges and universities should handle sexual harassment and sexual violence cases under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. She said students accused of perpetrating sexual assault have been deprived of due process in “kangaroo courts,” and that the Obama standard of “preponderance of the evidence” isn’t high enough.

Rubbish. I’ve been a professor on campuses for decades and I know this:

1. Only a small fraction of instances of sexual assault are reported, and, when they are, a very small fraction rape reports are found to be false.

2. Before the

Trump is jumping up and down with glee at how he stuck it to the…er…Republicans yesterday. He gloated about it in North Dakota last night and then this morning he called up Pelosi and Schumer to gloat with them. Which is hilarious, in a nauseating kind of way.

Many Republicans were furious with President Donald Trump’s budget deal Wednesday, stunned that the president quickly gave in to Democratic demands to pair hurricane relief with a three-month debt limit hike — though getting nothing in return.

But in calls with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Thursday morning, Trump raved about the positive news coverage it had received, according to people familiar with the calls,

Trump was unaware that North Dakota is subject to drought. Now that he knows, though, he moved to console the people of North Dakota by telling them they’re better off than the people of coastal Texas.

Prior to leaving the White House, I had a great bipartisan meeting with Democrat and Republican leaders in Congress, and I’m committed to working with both parties to deliver for our wonderful, wonderful citizens. It’s about time. We had a great meeting with Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the whole Republican leadership group. And I’ll tell you what, we walked out of there — Mitch and Paul, and everybody, Kevin — and we walked out and everybody was happy. Not too happy —

Ick.

Donald Trump has revealed that his daughter Ivanka asked to join him on his North Dakota trip, telling crowds she said: “Daddy, can I go with you?”

…

Beckoning her up to the stage, he said: “Come up, honey”. Then he shared an anecdote about how Ms Trump asked her father if she could join him.

“She said, ‘Dad, can I come with you. Actually she said ‘Daddy, can I go with you?’ I like that,” he said. “I said, ‘Yes, you can.'”

Aww. Cute story. Is she five? Six?

Oh that’s right, she’s 35. She has children of her own. She’s a grown-ass adult.

Also, presidents don’t in fact make it a habit to bring their small … Read the rest