Trump likes showing off his new gig
The Times has more on Trump’s dinner with Abe and a few hundred of his closest friends.
President Trump and his top aides coordinated their response to North Korea’s missile test on Saturday night in full view of diners at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — a remarkable, public display of presidential activity that is almost always conducted in highly secure settings.
The scene — of aides huddled over their computers and the president on his cellphone at his club’s terrace — was captured by a club member dining not far away and published in pictures on his Facebook account. The images also show Mr. Trump conferring with his guest at the resort, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister.
Well it could have been worse. They could have gone to Olive Garden or Applebee’s.
The fact that the national security incident was playing out in public view drew swift condemnation from some Democrats, who said it was irresponsible for Mr. Trump not to have moved his discussion to a more private location.
“There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, said in a Twitter message.
Discussions about how to respond to international incidents involving adversaries like North Korea are almost always conducted in places that have high-tech protections against eavesdropping, like the White House Situation Room. When presidents are away from the White House, they often conduct important business in a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” or SCIF, a location that can be made temporarily impervious to eavesdropping.
Mr. Trump and his White House aides who joined him for dinner, including Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, did not relocate the discussion to such a facility.
It’s like this. They were hungry, see? The steak and baked potatoes had just arrived, and they didn’t want to wait to dive in. They’re people too you know.
The president’s dinner with Mr. Abe was also a departure.
Mr. Trump’s predecessors have almost always held such working dinners in private facilities. In 2013, former President Barack Obama held a dinner with China’s President Xi Jinping at the Sunnylands resort in Palm Springs, Calif. But the dinner between the leaders was out of sight of members of the public.
But Mr. Trump appears to enjoy presenting the spectacle of his presidency to those at his privately held club, where members pay $200,000 to join. While the club is not open to the public, Mr. Trump’s dinner with Mr. Abe was in the club’s dining room, where any member or their guests were likely to be.
But they had to pay 20 grand to be there, or at least be the guests of people who paid 20 grand to be there. Obviously those people are not going to be agents of North Korea. That’s biologically impossible, or something.
But seriously – I want to know why Trump is not being boiled in oil over this.
I really don’t know…
There is pretty much zero benefit to letting him continue, but Congressional Republicans continue to be spineless and pathetic. They get screamed at during their town halls, they’re inundated with phone calls, mail, personal visits, etc… and instead of deal with the problem they retreat into their little safe spaces…
All it would take to end most/all of their current problems is giving Lord Cheeto the boot, but nope, gotta just sit on their hands.
He can be removed from office by the Republican-controlled Congress or his own Cabinet and VP. The former are elected by the same voters who gave us Trump, who like someone who doesn’t care about the rules, security, procedure, any of that silliness, and funded by the same individuals and organizations whose goals are magnificently served by the Big Orange Security Breach. The latter are his minions, able to cash in on the office he’s provided them and to wreck the government each according to their own desires.
We’re going to have Trump until 2020, until his health craps out, until he gets bored being the center of attention (ha), or until those voters, donors, and Cabinet stooges get tired enough of this to oust him, or have their Congressminions do it. And the only things they’re going to get tired of are the things they actually mind him doing.
In the meantime, all the violations of law and Constitution, all the human rights neglect, all the corruption, all the hateful stunts – are features, not bugs, from their point of view.
@Jeff:
Oh, absolutely… but there’s plenty of stuff he’s doing that they *should* be sufficiently upset about: picking fights with allies for no reason, putting national security at risk in a fashion like this, deciding to build a wall financed by the taxpayer (no one in Congress can possibly be on board with anything beyond the symbolic fence they were already prepping to put up in sometime circa 2014), etc…
They should be upset about it, yes – but evidently they’re not upset enough about it to give him any trouble about it beyond the most pro forma gestures, if that. So it’s either not enough to compensate for the approval they have otherwise for him (or, what amounts to close-enough, the sense that he’s a good enough tool), or these really are things they are neutral or positive about.
Picking fights with allies – That’s going to be a problem for those who care about allies, certainly. But that’s not going to include any of the Republicans who are Trump’s fellow isolationists or unilateralists. Some Republican leaders probably do have a real regard for foreign allies, but if they figure they can mend fences behind him, pick up his messes like McCain’s tried to, maybe they figure the rest of the Trump package is something they can afford at the price of some bruised relations and damage control.
Putting national security at risk – Oh, they can call these growing pains and hope that he’ll listen to wiser heads after making every stupid rookie mistake possible before too much harm is done. They’ve been willing to risk things with other candidates who aren’t particularly careful thinkers – Reagan, Quayle, Dubya, Palin – and it’s easy to picture this sort of thing happening with one of them.
As for the Wall – It’s sure to be something that a lot of them will get a piece of, and for the rest, it’ll be a thing to point to as a symbol of their triumph. As a monument, it’d be hard to out-do, and a fantastic symbol of xenophobia and racism to fire up the base for years. For those who don’t think in terms quite that inhuman… it may be viewed as a fairly harmless indulgence, the price they pay – the price taxpayers pay, rather, and more than half of them are Democratic voters – to keep Trump and the hate vote.
I still think that the Congressional Republicans also see Trump as cover. They can do what they like without being noticed because the clowns in the clown car are attracting all their attention. Meanwhile the magicians can pull rabbits out of their sleeve to loot the federal treasury, trash the federal regulations, break the federal government, and then, when people don’t like it, blame Trump. Because…Trump is playing very nicely the role of single person in charge of everything, and is willing to soak in that sunlight. They’ll be quite happy to blame everything that goes wrong on him, and his ethics around business (or lack thereof, actually) will also divert most of the heat of the looted Treasury to him when we enter the next meltdown.
Then, they boot Trump in a big fiery display of bravado, take their bows, and take all the credit for “saving” the country that is no longer salvageable.
iknklast @ 5
That scenario seems more appropriate for some Latin American oil republic than the US..Trump has an alarming number of ‘caudillo’ characteristics already, so he might be tempted to imitate Erdogan.
Jeff@4
Would the party that outed Valerie Plame be concerned about putting national security at risk?