Spare a thought for the unhappy people who have to deal with Traveling Donnie from Queens. They’ve been up nights trying to work out how to do it without setting off a war or indictments or global disgrace.

Embassies in Washington trade tips and ambassadors send cables to presidents and ministers back home suggesting how to handle a mercurial, strong-willed leader with no real experience on the world stage, a preference for personal diplomacy and a taste for glitz.

Oh if only that were all. There’s also the profound stupidity, the lack of control, the vanity and narcissism, the dishonesty, the rudeness, the total ignorance of history, politics, economics, and everything else, the temper, the vulgarity…to name a few.

After

Donnie Twoscoops is having fun for the first time in awhile, because the Saudis are treating him like a Seriously Important Special Dude.

President Trump was received like visiting royalty here Saturday, as his debut on the world stage competed for attention at home with ongoing news of the scandal encircling his presidency.

In a series of official arrival ceremonies — at the airport and the Royal Court palace — Trump, his wife, Melania, and an entourage including virtually his entire senior White House staff and much of his Cabinet, were serenaded by military bands, treated to a flyover of Saudi jets, feted in opulent palaces and given the undivided attention of King Salman, the ruler of this ultra-conservative

Even Trump’s own people are calling him names now, at least according to the Daily Beast.

The administration officials and West Wing aides who were left grounded stateside on Friday late afternoon couldn’t do much more than dodge questions and vent inflamed frustrations at their boss.

Were they thinking he’s better than this? That doesn’t seem very bright either.

“Trump himself hasn’t been implicated in any of these leaks except where he’s implicated himself, where he says something that makes his perhaps less-than-sterling intentions clear,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the controversy candidly. “He keeps saying there’s no collusion, and I think he’s right. So if he would just shut his

Robert Reich on Facebook:

European governments, preparing for a round of major summits with Donald Trump next week, are wary.

I spent much of the past week speaking with officials and cabinet ministers in Europe. All they wanted to talk about was Trump. Here, in summary, are the most frequent remarks I heard, in rough order of frequency:

1. Trump is unstable, and we’re not going to count on anything he says or commits to.

2. Trump doesn’t support NATO or European integration.

3. Trump is actively encouraging racist nationalists in our country.

4. Trump is allied with Putin to bring Europe down.

5. There’s no doubt Trump worked with Putin to win the U.S. presidential election.

6. If

Trump thinks all this is just terrible, because it makes us look Not United.

“I believe it hurts our country terribly, because it shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country,” Mr Trump told CNN and CNBC .

Huh. That’s funny, because his campaign was all about how divided and not-unified we are, and also all about making us more so. His whole shtick is Us versus Them. Drain the swamp; the people versus the experts; good people versus bad hombres; real Murkans versus scary immigrants; real voters versus fake voters; Trump versus women he dislikes. His inaugural address was about what a toilet the country is. His tweets are all about the press as enemies of the people … Read the rest

Alexandra Petri on what Trump is.

The Trump presidency is the discovery that what you thought was a man in a bear suit is just a bear. Suddenly the fact that he wouldn’t play by the rules makes total sense. It wasn’t that he refused to, that he was playing a long game. It was that he was a wild animal who eats fish and climbs trees, and English words were totally unintelligible to him. In retrospect, you should have suspected that after he just straight-up ate a guy. But at the time everyone cheered. It was good TV. Also, he was your bear.

…

Who can help? The people in there with him are the people who did

Trump knew Flynn was under investigation when he hired him. As his national security adviser.

Michael T. Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case.

Despite this warning, which came about a month after the Justice Department notified Mr. Flynn of the inquiry, Mr. Trump made Mr. Flynn his national security adviser. The job gave Mr. Flynn access to the president and nearly every secret held by American intelligence agencies.

So does that seem like a wise and responsible move? No it does not.

Mr. Flynn’s disclosure, on Jan. 4, was

Saudia Arabia still loves Donnie Twoscoops. They’re excited about his trip.

The Saudis have internationalized the event, organizing a sprawling “Arab Islamic American Summit” with leaders from dozens of Muslim countries, as well as talks with the king, the inauguration of a counterterrorism center, and public forums for business executives and young people.

Saudi Arabia, home to some of Islam’s holiest sites, will be pulling out all the stops for a man who has declared “Islam hates us” and said the United States is “losing a tremendous amount of money” defending the kingdom.

But Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies were so angry over former President Barack Obama’s policies toward the Middle East that they appear prepared to